WEST LEBANON — After more than 45 years in business, financial troubles and a falling out between business partners led music shop Blue Mountain Guitar to take a final bow last weekend.

News of the April 12 closing was unexpected for employees and customers alike.

Staff received no word of the closure until that morning when they got a group text from owner Barbara McKelvy explaining that “the store’s closed (and) the locks have been changed,” said longtime employee Chris Decato.

“We were blindsided,” Decato said.

In the week following the closure, customers and the store’s four employees did not receive information about when they could pick up their equipment, which included instruments that were there for consignment and repair.

According to McKelvy, the store’s manager Tyler Geno removed the book containing customers’ contact information from the Glen Road Plaza storefront, making it impossible for her to arrange returns.

Geno would not say whether or not he has the book. “She hasn’t been in touch with me since the day she closed the store,” he said.

On Monday, Decato and customer Vince Brisson were able to enter the store to retrieve their equipment. McKelvy contacted Brisson using information from an email correspondence, Brisson said.

McKelvy attributed the store’s shuttering to financial hardship.

“Blue Mountain Guitar closed because its indebtedness effectively sealed off the opportunity to ever achieve a satisfactory level of growth and profitability,” she said in an email correspondence.

Geno, who has run the business with McKelvy since 2017, had a different interpretation of events, calling the closure a “personal attack.”

“We were in a relationship at one point … Pretty much the entire time that we ran Blue Mountain,” Geno said.

The relationship ended shortly before the store closed, Geno said.

Blue Mountain Guitar has a long history in the Upper Valley. The original owners, Colleen and Craig Hauser, opened the store in West Lebanon in 1979. The shop soon became a go-to spot for affordable equipment, repairs and lessons.

The store changed hands in 1985 and again in 2003, when McKelvy and her then-husband, Doug, bought the business from longtime owner Jim Eibner.

In 2016, the McKelvys moved the business exclusively online, closing the brick and mortar storefront.

A year later, Barbara McKelvy and Geno opened a new location in New London at which point Doug McKelvy was no longer associated with the business.

In 2019, the duo opened a new store in Glen Road Plaza in West Lebanon. The business moved to its current location a few years later.

“It’s too bad that the town is going to lose out on having a nice little store,” said Decato, who taught guitar lessons at Blue Mountain. “Every town needs to have its own music store. It’s important for community and for kids to have that outlet.”

At the time of the closure, Decato had about 40 students he taught through Blue Mountain. Now he’s looking for new place to teach. “Maybe someone will open up their garage to me,” he said.

Decato, who’s worked at Blue Mountain for seven years, said he’s known about the store since the ‘90s.

“It was nice to be a part of that history,” he said.

Marion Umpleby can be reached at mumpleby@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.