Otterblog

We ran a news obituary on Sunday about the death of Sam Moss, who for many years ran Sam Moss Guitars on Burke Street.

The death of a guy who sold guitars isn’t front-page news, but it’s worth covering in this instance. News obituaries are a chance to take stock of a person’s life and how he or she fit into the fabric of our community.

I bought the only guitar I’ve ever bought from Moss. A 1953 Gibson acoustic with a slim neck and a big sound. My son bought his guitar—a strange Japanese-style electric—there also right before the store closed. Moss was a character, with his wild shrub of hair waving this way and that, his erratic and sporadic hours, and his incredible knowledge of guitars. Basically, he was cool. Not celebrity cool. Just cool.

And in the death of his scruffy store there was in a sense a larger symbol of our city’s change. The Arts District was booming, big plans were in place for the West End neighborhood where the guitar shop was. But this little remnant of an arts scene that didn’t quite conform to all the conventional rules didn’t make it. And neither did Sam Moss.

In another Sunday story, we took a look at the question of Winston-Salem’s arts legacy and future, and despite all the good reporting and analysis, the story makes clear that it’s uncertain whether we are still the city of the arts. But I do think that all the questions about shaky finances and crumbling buildings and leaky roofs and West Side Story and RiverRun miss some of the more subtle intangibles about the success of arts communities. It’s that they are welcoming for characters, the eccentric people who don’t quite fit into anybody’s vision, but are still important. For lack of better words, it’s about our heart and soul.