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“The Guv’nah” himself will be on hand at tonight’s CD release show by the band who’s name he inspired.

“He’s still out there — we traded e-mails with him this week, and it looks like he’ll be at the show, so he’ll get the honorary first copy of our CD,” Dirty Guv’nahs guitarist Justin Hoskins told The Daily Times this week. “We thought it would be appropriate, especially since he lives in Johnson City and he pretty much comes to any regional show we do. He’s a dedicated fan.”

In fact, he’s the reason Hoskins and his bandmates christened their band The Dirty Guv’nahs. It was almost two years ago when the group played it first public show, opening for Sister Hazel at a benefit concert in Knoxville’s Old City, without a name.

According to Hoskins, nothing the band members came up with stuck, so they went without a name for their first show. In the audience that day was a tall guy on crutches.

“He was just going crazy; you would have thought he had known us for years,” Hoskins told The Daily Times back in the spring. “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 … 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.”

Earlier this year, the band released a four-song EP, which captured the sounds of a promising young outfit that veered between “Exile”-era Rolling Stones and The Band. With the new album, “Don’t Need No Money,” the Guv’nahs are showcasing a band that’s seasoned well over the past year, playing dozens of shows (including several over the summer at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson’s “Shed” concert series in Maryville) and honing the instrumental and songwriting skills of its members.

“When we first made the earlier demo, we were really new to this whole process, and we weren’t real happy with a lot of our songs,” Hoskins said. “We had a lot, but we weren’t totally thrilled with them. We didn’t really know what we were doing, and we recorded it all ourselves. It helped us get our feet wet with the whole recording process, but it was our first attempt at it, and it made us realize that we needed to keep writing.”

The band set a goal of accumulating a quality batch of studio-ready songs by year’s end, but a first-place win in a Battle of the Bands contest at the University of Tennessee campus came with an unexpected prize — free studio time at Underground Studios in Seymour. The prize was awarded in August; the band set aside a block of time to record “Don’t Need No Money” in October.

“We didn’t know what we were going to record, but we knew we were going to bust it to come up with a full-length CD,” Hoskins said. “We did it, and we went in and had a great experience.”

The end result is an album that’s earthy in tone, rootsy in nature and rich in flavor. From slide guitar to raucous barroom sing-alongs, it’s evident that the Guv’nahs enjoy each other’s company and enjoy making music even more. For all of its rough-and-tumble feel, there’s a good-natured warmth of spirit that shines through on these nine songs that promises no matter how much fun these guys have channeling the Black Crowes, the Allman Brothers and the Stones in the studio, it’s gonna be a helluva lot more fun watching them do it on stage.

Because despite the quality of the songs on “Don’t Need No Money,” the band members recognize that their true power lies in how well they’re recreated in a live setting. Fortunately, the long string of shows the band played over the summer helped hone the band members’ live chops, Hoskins said.

“We’re about putting on a live show, and when we were first starting out, it was harder to get shows, especially without a record, but once people gave us a chance, we were always invited back to everywhere we’ve ever played,” he said. “We liked road-testing the songs on this new album, to see what went over and what sounded good live, and all of the songs on it were played for the first time out at ‘The Shed.’ Our live shows are known for being high-energy, and it’s pretty hard to capture that on an album in a studio setting, but it’s a lot of fun to try, though.”

One of the most enjoyable performing experiences the Guv’nahs had was at a “Shed” show, Hoskins added. It was a June date opening for a Led Zeppelin cover band and featuring an appearance by national good-ol’-boy radio deejays John Boy and Billy. “The Shed” was packed, and the Guv’nahs vowed to win over the crowd no matter what.

“We didn’t know ‘The Shed’ could hold that many people, and even though they weren’t necessarily there for us and we didn’t know what was going to happen, we knew we were gonna go up there and go nuts and make them remember our names,” Hoskins said. “It was a good feeling, and it turned a lot of people onto us. I’ve never sweated so much during a show, but it felt really good to have people come up to us for hours after we were done, telling us how much they liked us.

“There are tons of musicians out there who are great on their instruments and way better than us musically, but what we bring to the table is going all-out on stage. We want to leave our mark on them and go crazy. What we love about the live show is all kinds of different people coming together who would never be in that setting in any other situation — but for that night, they all come together to have a good time.

“That’s what it’s all about,” he added. “We want to give them a few hours to forget about what else is going on.”