With her cowgirl hat, platinum bob and 1940s Western getups, L.A.-based artist Rosy Nolan looks like a throwback to the midcentury heyday of California honky-tonk legends such as Rose Maddox and Jean Shepard. But the San Francisco native honed her performance chops in riot-grrl and post-punk indie bands across the US and the UK before finding a home in L.A.’s tight-knit old-time community. Now a confident bandleader and guitarist whose vulnerable songs and onstage charm have endeared her to audiences across Southern California and around the US, Nolan is in the vanguard of L.A.’s latest Country music resurgence. She’s planning an April West Coast tour with Detroit country artist Rachel Brooke, and her single “One of Your Songs” advances her fourth album, due this summer from Blackbird Record Label.

Nolan’s childhood was fertile ground for a future songwriter. Her artistic parents (Mom was a poet, Dad an activist) mingled with the likes of Bayard Rustin, Allen Ginsburg, Jane Fonda and Harvey Milk, and her dad co-founded the Pickle Family Circus, an offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troupe; the circus piano player taught 10-year-old Nolan how to play 12-bar blues and boogie-woogie. By the ’90s, she was drumming in Bay Area riot-grrl bands formed with high school pals and writing “screechy” punk songs. After majoring in women’s studies at UC Santa Cruz and following a lover to London for a grand romantic misadventure, Nolan kicked around Brooklyn playing with various post-punk indie bands. She began tilting toward roots music after hearing Lucinda Williams’ album World Without Tears.

“It’s really rare for me to remember the first time I hear something, but World Without Tears had just come out and a friend was playing it for us in his East Village apartment,” she recalls. “I still remember him putting on the album — I was like, ‘Whoa, what is this?!’”

That revelatory event recalibrated Nolan’s musical compass. She’d grown up liking Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and Patsy Cline, but not until hearing Lucinda Williams did she make the connection with country music and truly understand what it was. She soon discovered Americana luminaries such as Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch and sought out more traditional music by the Carter Family and Hazel Dickens. Williams and Dickens particularly resonated with Nolan as they laced hard themes and bruised hearts with aching melodies.

But after eight years of slamming into career dead ends, a burned-out Nolan slumped back to California to recharge on a Mendocino farm before relocating to Los Angeles in 2012 and putting a pause on her music career. She started taking clawhammer banjo lessons at McCabe’s storied guitar shop in Santa Monica, where she stumbled into L.A.’s old-time community. Joining old-time jams around L.A. and camping out at West Coast and Louisiana festivals, she learned to “jam with people and improvise” in ways she never had before. 

“It’s so underground, which is why I love it, honestly,” she says of L.A.’s old-time subculture. “Nobody’s making money off old-time music; people might have egos, but you’re there to be part of a community, have a good time, learn, teach somebody sitting next to you, pass on these stories that are centuries old. There’s never a sense that anyone has ulterior motives; the emphasis is really on the community. I needed that after my time in New York — just to play like when I was a kid.”

That community introduced Nolan to a broader range of musicians while awakening her to the traditional country and early bluegrass music that now informs her sound. Her 2019 EP, Footsteps & Broken Branches, co-produced by Rancid guitarist Tim Armstrong and Water Tower bluegrass guitarist Kenny Feinstein, was awash in fiddle, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and mandolin — the first serious example of Nolan writing contemporary songs with an old-time design. Then the pandemic shut down clubs and all career momentum; when venues finally reopened, L.A.’s Americana and country scene exploded with artists hungry to connect with one another and perform for live audiences instead of their laptop screens. “When the pandemic was over, I decided to stick to that old-time feel with a string band instead of doing the classic country band setup,” Nolan says. “I got a little clearer about what I wanted.” 

She also chopped and bleached her long hair and played with clothes in new ways. Flowing dresses were replaced by a feistier retro cowgirl look: embroidery, fringe, tassles, shorts, cowboy hats and boots. She spends a lot more time dressing up to go onstage but preparing her getup is a key part of the performance: “Something happens to me when I’m getting ready, putting my hair in curls, putting on a cowboy hat. I’m getting into character. That’s really useful when I perform.”

Soon she was playing a circuit of country nights at welcoming L.A. venues. Positive word of mouth spread and 2022 saw her performing at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio and signing to Blackbird Record Label. In 2023, she performed at Topanga Banjo Fiddle Festival, SXSW in Austin, the Americana West Fest at Hollywood’s Hotel Café, and AmericanaFest in Nashville. Audiences responded enthusiastically to spiky new tunes such as the amusingly catchy “Get on Me” and “One of Your Songs,” about a serial two-timer who gets his comeuppance:

 “You want your cake and to eat it too

So you keep me on the line

Go ahead figure out your life

And stop wasting mine”

“Writing has been a way for me to digest the experience I’m having,” Nolan says of the “long list of unsuccessful relationships” that provide extensive fodder for her relatable, smartly crafted songs. “I find that usually the voice of the songwriter has a better idea of what’s going on than I do. There have been many times I’ve gone back to a song and thought, ‘Oh, I knew exactly what was going on.’ Even if there was part of me that couldn’t admit it to myself, the song didn’t hold anything back. The song told the truth.”