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If you turn out on Saturday night to "The Shed" at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson, be sure and get there early enough to catch the opening band.

Not only do The Dirty Guv'nahs, who open the show for Mic Harrison and The High Score, play a rollicking, feel-good brand of Southern rock and country boogie, they also come with a fan so enthusiastic he helped the band pick out its name.

It's a strange story, almost too bizarre to be anything but true, according to Dirty Guv'nah Justin Hoskins. And it started about a year ago, when the band played its first public show without a name.

"We had sort of tossed around some band names, but we couldn't decide on anything, so we played it nameless," Hoskins told The Daily Times this week. "At this show, though, there was a guy in the front row. He was really tall — probably about 6-foot-5, and he was on crutches. And he was just going crazy; you would have thought he had known us for years. We kept asking each other if one of us knew him, but nobody did. And the local news was out there (in the Old City, where the band opened for Sister Hazel) covering the concert, because it was a benefit show, and they were interviewing some people about it.

"And they talked to this guy while we were playing behind him! He kept referring to himself as 'the Guv'nah' — 'I'm the Guv'nah,' he'd say, and then he said, 'This band is so dirty, I'm going to go home and burn my own house down.' We didn't ask too many questions, but we liked the weirdness of it all. We tracked him down and found out he lives up in Johnson City, and now he makes it out to a lot of our shows.

"The story was just too good to pass up, so when we started debating a name again, we thought, we have to name our band after this guy," Hoskins added.

The six-piece outfit came together about a year and a half ago. The members had known each other through college, and at some point, they ended up falling together for an impromptu jam session. It turned out much better than expected.

"We've all kind of lived together at one point or another, and we were always getting the guitars out and jamming," Hoskins said. "My little brother had been playing drums for years, but I had never really played with him, so a couple of us invited him over, and he started playing drums.

"The pieces of the band just sort of fell together in weird
ways. For instance, a friend of mine was hiking the Appalachian Trail, and he
hurt his foot, so he called me to pick him up so he could take a few days off.
While he was in town, he called his best friend and invited him to join our band — without telling the rest of us! So he just showed up, and he's been a part of it ever since.

A four-song EP quickly followed, and Hoskins described the group's influences as landing somewhere between "Exile"-era Rolling Stones and the rootsy sounds of The Band. Although the Guv'nahs are still making a name for themselves in the local scene, there's a surprising amount of talent and power on the four songs — from the juke joint-feel of "Blue Rose Stroll," driven by barrelhouse piano to the blues-drenched, R&B tinged feel of "Believer." Singer James Trimble's voice has a confidence and power that's counter-balanced by crunchy guitar licks, and on the closing track — the stellar, stunning, acoustic-driven "Stealin'" — The Dirty Guv'nahs showcase a potential to go places and rock houses.

Luck seems to have a way of finding the band, whether it's in the composition of a great song like "Stealin'" or in booking shows. In fact, the band booked that show opening for Sister Hazel — at a benefit for the Invisible Children Fund — before it even had any original songs written. The members had to scramble to come up with a healthy selection of covers, but they succeeded ... and then they met Richard, the original "Dirty Guv'nah."

"We went ahead with the show because it was too good an opportunity to turn down," Hoskins said. "We were still figuring out our identity, and what was really natural just came out of those early jam sessions. All of us have played off and on for years, but we had never really gone for it the way we're going for it now. None of us had any intentions or any plans to do that at first; we just wanted to jam.

"The day after we decided that we would be a band, we had a show booked. We got together and jammed like always, and we knew this was for real. We wanted to do it, and it came natural. We didn't sit down and say, 'Let's go for this type of sound or that type of sound'; we just started playing, and it came natural."

And what of the "Dirty Guv'nah," the dude from Johnson City who helped the band find its identity ... or at least its name? Will he be in attendance on Saturday night at "The Shed" at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson?

It's always a possibility, Hoskins said.

"He's a hard one to miss, and he does make it out to a lot of shows, so hopefully he'll be there," Hoskins said. "You know it's going to be a good show, a special show, when you see him in the crowd."