Rediscovered recordings showcase work of local guitar legend Sam Moss

Sam Moss was a legendary musician in Winston-Salem for decades after his arrival in the 1960s. He was considered a mentor to many people, whether it was on the stage, or in the downtown guitar shop that he owned. But very little of his work has been heard by the public aside from his concert performances. That's changed with the recent release of an album of re-discovered recordings Moss left behind. 

The project began when musician and Winston-Salem native Chris Stamey took a pandemic break to go through some old tapes of his former band, the dB's. 

“I found a master of Sam Moss that I didn't realize existed, and it was a fantastic track, a song called ‘Rooster Blood,'" he says. “Once that King Tut tomb kind of opened, I found a few more things on an associated reel and started talking to people and other tapes surfaced. We found it was really a whole album.”

Mitch Easter, a musician and producer who found fame with the band Let's Active, made the recordings in Chapel Hill more than 40 years ago. Stamey says Moss' mentorship helped him, Easter and others create the music scene in Winston-Salem during that era.

“Sam Moss came to town in I think 1968 fully formed as a great guitar player,” he says. “And we were all trying to break the code of, you know, what is Eric Clapton doing? What is Buddy Guy doing and what is B.B. King doing? And Sam knew it and he would show us kids how it was done. He was like a light in the wilderness for all of our circle in the late 60s and early 70s.”

Moss was known more as a performer than a songwriter. That's one of the exciting things about the release — it features a handful of songs that Moss actually wrote.

"I think everything Sam did had a little bit of a blues tilt to it,” Stamey says. “But this is not straight blues. ... Sam's material in this record was more evocative to me of Muscle Shoals or some of the Memphis recordings. Just a whole lot of soul in it. And a lot of swagger.”

Moss was a character. He had a fondness for W.C. Fields and could fly planes. He also had a language all his own. Ed Bumgardner is a longtime musician and music journalist in Winston-Salem and wrote the liner notes for the album. He says its title, Blues Approved, is taken from one of his sayings. 

“It's just like the highest compliment Sam can give anything or anybody,” he says. “Instead of Sam just saying, ‘Man, that's the greatest thing I've ever heard,' it would be 'blues approved.' And that's Sam using a form of music that he thought, and rightly so, was the last great pure American expression of music.”

Moss' contributions to Winston-Salem's music landscape are well documented. There's a bronze star with his name on it on the city's Walk of Fame outside of the Benton Convention Center. And yet he seemed to have no interest in the superstardom that rock music could bring. That may be one reason he left so few recordings behind. So why did he never take that leap?

“That's the million-dollar question,” Bumgardner says. “Sam had choices. Sam had chances. I mean, he could have packed up and gone to New York. He knew people there. He could have gone to Macon during the rise of this southern rock thing because he knew people there. He was friends with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. But he just didn't want to. And I'm not sure. I don't know. It's something that everybody that knew him wondered about.”

The new album was released in January by Schoolkids Records.

In addition to the music laid down by Easter, there are also tracks on the album recorded from 1989 to 1993 by another local musician and producer, Henry Heidtmann. These songs move away from self-penned tunes to the kind of pop-rock that Moss loved, including the Monkee's hit “Pleasant Valley Sunday.”

As with the earlier recordings, once they were finished, Moss showed no inclination to share them with the world. Bumgardner says that impulse is hard to explain.

“Do you take the swing and miss and have to live a failure, or do you stay in a comfort zone and play better than anybody in the country?” he says. “I know that sounds crazy, but I've seen Sam play where he was nearly levitating … There would be moments. And in those moments, the world stops. Those moments where Sam turned it on, and got out of his own way. Yeah, it just leaves you shaking your head and laughing because I mean, it's as good as it gets.”

Moss died in 2007 at the age of 54. Stamey says he'd be amused at the renewed attention the album is bringing.