A requiem for Matty Sheets — 1976-2024

Featured photo: Matty never worried about cool, though he was, in fact, cool. (photo by Carolyn de Berry)

I was too late to catch Matty Sheets before he left us for good.

He had just been transferred to hospice care after a truly unfortunate series of events. First there was the MS diagnosis, which happened years ago, late in 2016. It robbed him of some of his vitality and independence, slowed him down more than he liked. But he rolled with it, telling journalist Eddie Huffman about a year later, “[I]t’s a neurological disease, but it’s not as bad as being in love. It’s manageable.”

Matty knew from the pain of love.

Earlier this month, hospitalized with what he believed to be complications from MS, doctors found Stage IV cancer that had spread all over his body — no recourse, no cure. Basically a death sentence. Emblematic of his relentless positivity, he opted for surgery, thinking it might buy him some time or offer some relief. That’s not what happened.

Matty knew from plans gone wrong, too.

Within a couple weeks he was near the end, first in the hospital and then in a private room on Summit Avenue where, surrounded by friends, he finally accepted his fate.

All of us who knew him already know all this stuff. We’ve been lamenting and celebrating for days on Facebook, swapping stories and sharing YouTubes, all of us remembering how we met this skinny goofball who had more love for the Greensboro music scene then anyone, ever.

I’m not writing this for them. They all know how shy and special he was. I’m writing this for the rest of you, who might not have known.

Every local music scene needs a guy like Matty. Talented, sure, and an unabashed booster even during those years when that kind of enthusiasm seemed incredibly un-cool. Matty never worried about cool, though he was, in fact, cool. He played in too many bands to remember in the years since I met him, shortly after I moved here in 2000. That’s when he and his buddy Mikey Roohan worked at the old Pie Works on Lawndale, just a couple doors down from my mother-in-law’s health food store, where my wife was working. They may have been my first Greensboro friends here. They started a band right around that time, Deviled Eggs, which in its first incarnation was… not for everybody. My editor at the time described them as “terrible” when I pitched them for a music feature. They got better.

Eventually, Matty’s music was wonderful. Through sheer persistence and positivity he became a seasoned songwriter, crafting sparse pieces about love gone wrong, life gone wrong, and how it was all going to be okay anyway. For more than 20 years he lived a troubadour’s life: starting bands, writing songs, playing gigs. He must have played a thousand of them before he was through. He always knew the bartender’s name. And wherever he was, he was just so fucking happy to be there.

He’s all over the Triad City Beat archives, in stories about his gigs and references to his career, which was intensely and purposefully local in scope: his 40^th birthday at a Ben Singer show at NY Pizza; the night he, Singer and Sam Frazier played one of Singer’s original movie scores for a Chaplin film at the Green Bean; a rare Winston-Salem performance at the Garage with a slew of folk acts where, our music writer, Jordan Green, noted, “He delivered songs about a house haunted by a suicide, bridge jumpers and eyeballs that resemble guns in earnest folk vocals barbed with a sardonic edge, warbling from country blues to deadpan alt-rock.”

My favorite, penned by Jordan Green in 2014, took place at a Blockheads show at the old Blind Tiger. It was one of those nights where nobody showed, a crowd so small that Matty knew them all by name — all except one.

“Spotting a slender man with silver hair seated at a bar table near the back, he added, ‘And I’m sorry: I don’t know your name, sir.’

“Emily Stewart, the banjo player, prompted him: ‘Allen.”

“It was Allen Joines, the mayor of Winston-Salem.”

What did he know? Matty was a Greensboro guy.

One driving factor to his short, sweet life was the open-mic night he started hosting back at the Flat Iron, when the place was still a subterranean dive bar and you could smoke. He kept it going for 20 years, moving it from the Flat to NY Pizza to the Westerwood and the Green Bean, and then the Continental Club. Last year he hosted one at Folk Fest, a feather in his crooked cap and a formal acknowledgement of his role in the music scene of which he was such an integral part.

You won’t find a Greensboro musician from that era who didn’t know Matty Sheets. They played his open-mic and he learned their name. He encouraged them to start a band. They remembered something he said to them as they fought for years — like he did — to get their flowers. They asked him to sit in, or he showed up at one of their shows and cheered louder than anyone else in the room.

All of us on the cultural fringe in Greensboro knew Matty Sheets, and we all knew he loved us. He wore his love for us all like he wore his glasses: right there on his face, impossible to deny.

It was love that drove Matty Sheets, as best I can tell — not for fame or money or even the music, which mattered to him very much. More than that, he loved the people who made it possible, even though he was the one who made it all possible.

He lived for us all and the things we created. In turn, he created much more than just a body of work, a string of bands, a small stack of recordings. In so many ways, Matty was the embodiment of the city and its music scene, the connective tissue that kept it all coherent, the enthusiastic engine that pushed it forward.Those of us who know will feel his absence… forever… even as we tend his garden as best we can.