At the Back Table, There Are No Strangers

On a wooden post in Greensboro’s Back Table coffee house hangs a honey-colored, acoustic Cordoba guitar. The instrument was a favorite of the late local singer-songwriter Matty Sheets, who is remembered for both his talent and community building.

“He’s the thread that involved a lot of our music scene,” said Laura Jane Vincent, Back Table’s events manager. “He’s the reason a lot of us know each other, and of course, he inspired and mentored a lot of us.”

Sheets embodied the city’s artistic class for more than two decades. More than a musician, the skinny, bespectacled Renaissance man curated music sets, hosted open mic nights, and connected other musicians in and around multiple venues, big and small, within Greensboro. 

A prolific songwriter, Sheets helped others start and cultivate their tastes while continuing to foster his own art.

Sitting at a round table in the back of the coffee shop, Vincent and co-owner Josh Tovey reminisce about their relationship with Sheets. Vincent was his talent manager and friend for many years. Tovey, who moved to Greensboro in 2018, said he first met Sheets at the old Green Bean coffee shop—now Chandler’s—downtown. He saw Sheets playing ukulele and asked his friend Galen Foresman, who co-owned the Green Bean with his former wife Amy, to introduce them.

“I asked Galen, ‘Do you think he would be interested in, like, hanging out? Playing together?’” Tovey said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, dude.’ And so I asked him and immediately Matty was just like, ‘Yeah, come over later.’”

It’s a story that’s familiar to virtually anyone who has been involved in Greensboro’s music scene: the disarming friendliness with which Sheets would greet people, gather strangers, and by the end of the night, turn them into friends.

It’s how the coffee shop, which opened in January, got its name.

“We were always sitting at the back of the Green Bean and he always made it a point to walk back,” Tovey said. “He would walk to the back table and say, ‘Back table!’”

In September of last year, Sheets died after a long battle with multiple sclerosis and Stage IV colon cancer.

But his spirit lives on.

The Continental Club, located next to Back Table on South Elm Street, continues Sheets’ tradition by hosting a weekly Matty Sheets Open-Mic night.

At Back Table, they’re working to realize Sheets’s vision for a creative community.

Inside the more than 7,500-square-foot interior, artists, makers, and musicians find companionship in the nooks and corners of the shop. At the front, a coffee bar serves everything from lattes to pastries and pizzas. There are tables, couches, and chairs for meetings, shows, and even yoga sessions with live music.

Since its official opening in January, Back Table has hosted an antique show, political rallies, a benefit show for Western North Carolina, open mics (of course), and multiple honky tonk jams.

“The big picture in my head…is to be like an East Coast epicenter of music and art and expression, but on the small scale,” Vincent said. “A space for everyone in this community who can come as they are, be themselves, work together, work separately, jump in together.”

Having worked in the music industry for years, Vincent said Greensboro often gets overlooked for shows. But she wants the city to be recognized for its wealth of talent.

“I feel like Greensboro isn’t always the first choice as an artistic city in North Carolina,” she said. “But I feel like there are so many diverse people in Greensboro who are beautiful and talented.”

After Galen Foresman stepped away from the Green Bean in 2021, he and Tovey started brainstorming what a new coffee shop might look like. Initially, they hoped to create a welcoming space where Sheets himself could work and play music. When he died, the shop hosted a memorial for Sheets in which people from all over the world came to pay their respects. Since then, they’ve been letting the community influence how to use the space. 

“Any idea that comes through the door, if we can make it work, and if it can help the community in some way, we’re going to try to do it,” Tovey said.

Around the corner from Sheets’s hanging guitar, dressmaker Piper Gartner tears sheets of floral fabric with her hands. Lit by afternoon sunshine through the industrial-sized windows, Gartner gets to work making a pair of matching dresses.

“I was a good friend of Matty Sheets,” Gartner said. “He introduced me to Josh and Galen sometime last year before he passed, and they invited me to their soft opening on New Year’s Day. And I don’t think I’ve left since.”

Tucked into the back corner of the shop’s third room, Gartner has everything from a mannequin to a sewing machine to an ironing board set up in the space. She has a studio in her home but said she likes working out of the coffee shop because it’s “more interactive and fun.”

“I love how inspiring it is,” Gartner said. “Like as soon as you walk in…there’s something cool to look at whether it’s the super old architecture or the silos out the window or the amazing art on the walls.”

Across the room, an artist has set up an easel and displays a charcoal sketch of a woman with shoulder-length hair. In the middle room, Vincent plays notes on an electric keyboard, the sounds resonating through the vast space.

Eventually, Tovey said, they want to update the outdoor area, which has a long bar and grassy yard, to host even more events. Especially after the isolation of the pandemic, he wants Back Table to be a gathering place.

“This feels like we’re mending something,” he said. 

Vincent agreed.

“There’s not a lot of strangers here,” she said.

Sayaka Matsuoka is a Greensboro-based reporter for The Assembly. She was formerly the managing editor for Triad City Beat.

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