Singer, guitarist and songwriter Marie Nofsinger came onto my radar more than 25 years ago, as I was walking along Lake Avenue while she was performing live on the sidewalk stage in front of the Coffee Gallery in downtown Lake Worth.
This was back when Palm Beach County had a thriving original music scene — even if I purposely only heard some of its many such performers in passing if they didn’t stand out.
But Nofsinger’s unique mixture of folk and country music was simply too original to pass by. Her voice was soothing; her guitar playing intricate yet subtle. Still, it was the combination of her lyrics and her vocal phrasing that stood out most within her compositions, ranging from love songs to whimsical travel tales. With a biting wit, she could alternately deliver cynicism, irony or sarcasm in just the right doses, and at just the right times. All amid a beauty and twang that evoked images of Austin, Texas.
And all of which led to my first interview with her, for a 1998 profile in the West Palm Beach-based Free Press magazine, conducted over breakfast at TooJay’s in downtown Lake Worth. In between tales of her artistry, music history, and her beloved cat Eightball, she divulged that she was originally from Salem, Mass. I logically asked what had brought her to South Florida.
“Runnin’ from the law,” she said, with a sly grin that indicated it might even be true.
No further questions were asked on that front to protect the (presumably) innocent.
That summer, Nofsinger was one of several prominent South Florida artists who performed in the Songwriters Solstice concert staged by Delray Beach singer/songwriter Rod MacDonald at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse in West Palm Beach. One of the originals she performed was the ballad “I Am Blue,” from her excellent, independently released 1998 album Boots (such footwear, along with a cowboy hat, were often parts of Nofsinger’s stylish onstage ensembles). “I Am Blue” would become one of her signature songs, exemplifying her word play and expert comedic timing.
“I feel so bad I ought to just get married,” she quips within one of its verses, pausing before delivering the kicker: “Again.”
If Nofsinger was runnin’ from the law, she’d already proven to be an international outlaw. After residing in various parts of Massachusetts through the 1970s, she first relocated to Florida via Fort Lauderdale in 1981, then left for Val-d’Isère, France in 1983. Two years later, it was back to South Florida in Delray Beach, where she would live for the next 30 years while earning a deserved reputation as one of the region’s true musical originals.
When the Palm Beach Post asked me to choose area artists for a story called “The 10 Magnificent Musicians of Palm Beach County” in 2002, Nofsinger was a natural inclusion because of her songwriting, which can also range topically into politics (“Not My Flag”) and Florida history (“The Great Storm of 1928”). Hers was even the cover photo on the TGIF section to promote the story within.
Yet Nofsinger was already noticing a difference in the area music scene after the 20th century had become the 21st, foreseeing the near-demise of original music in favor of cover bands, tribute acts and lowest-common-denominator fare from karaoke to trivia.
“There’s not one center for songwriters, and there’s a lot of musicians here who don’t really mean it,” she told me. “They’re hobbyists.”
She was right, and even more so now. Nofsinger would continue to record sporadically, often as a guest on other artists’ projects; perform live occasionally, and lend her talents to ensemble shows saluting The Band’s The Last Waltz (as Emmylou Harris) and folk icon Pete Seeger between Delray Beach and Lake Worth.
Her “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night” performance series likewise encouraged hurricane donation items in the region, and Nofsinger also booked entertainment for the annual Delray Affair festival in her adopted hometown. She even promoted and produced concerts and videos of music for children.
Nofsinger additionally did bookkeeping and sales from 1999-2005 at the Amp Shop & Music Parlor, the musical instrument and repair store in West Palm Beach, and took up medical coding as an occupation before relocating west to Naples in 2015. Having outgrown Palm Beach County’s shrinking original music scene, she found new life performing in venues and festivals there and in nearby locales like Goodland, Bonita Springs and Marco Island.
The musical outlaw took her final, decade-long run while conquering South Florida’s west coast before recently dying there, and even friends could only guess about her age (the consensus being around 70, although she always seemed younger than she was). Nofsinger had been undergoing excruciating cancer treatments, only divulging her diagnosis with friends she trusted to keep her secret. One was Lake Worth Beach-based singer/songwriter George Manosis, who shared one of his exchanges with her on Facebook Messenger after her death.
“I’ve been at home on Hospice since May,” Nofsinger wrote to him in August. “I’m not doing any more chemo. It made me so sick. It’s been a great life, and hopefully an easy exit when it’s time.”
That time came on December 14. But another friend who also kept things hushed visited Nofsinger as the end approached, and indicates that her exit might not have indeed been overly uneasy.
“We went over to see her a couple weeks before the end,” says Bari Litschauer, owner of the Amp Shop and banjoist in the husband-and-wife duo Ron & Bari and the group Roadside Revue.
“Over the course of about three hours, she was full of piss and vinegar like the old Marie, singing and laughing so hard she almost fell out of her chair. She never revealed what kind of cancer she had, but by the time of her diagnosis, I know it was widespread. I’m so glad we got to see her one more time.”
“Words cannot express the depth of sadness I feel,” wrote Marianne Flemming, a friend and former South Florida singer/songwriter who now lives in Washington, on Facebook.
“I knew Marie almost 40 years. She took me under her wing when I walked into an open mic she was hosting in Lake Worth. Marie was the queen of the Palm Beach folk scene and the rest of Florida at the time. Her talent was epic — great songwriter, storyteller, singer — beautiful human being with a wicked sense of humor. We hit it off immediately and her generous spirit encouraged me to be me.”
Nofsinger certainly knew how to be herself, with a singular songwriting style influenced by rootsy, tell-it-like-it-is composers like Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and Warren Zevon. And very few artists can get away with the nearly impossible task of holding off the announcement of their deaths until after they’re gone. In that regard, Nofsinger joins other true originals like Frank Zappa, who pulled it off in 1993, and David Bowie, in 2016.
We are all blue in her absence.