Before there was a band, there was a kid from Harris County, GA with a voice. His elementary school music teacher, Mrs. Hammond, heard it first — around fourth grade, she recommended Matt Johnson try out for the Columbus Boys Choir, where he rose to head chorister, leading the whole ensemble before he'd finished growing up. At Harris County High School he was first-chair trumpet; a year ahead of him, on the drum line, was a snare drummer named Jason Holt. They became fast friends. The instruments would change — trumpet to guitar, snare to bass — but the partnership never did.
The first band came around 2004. It was called Old James — Matt and Jason with friends on guitars and drums, playing around Columbus, GA: house parties, local stages, even the Harris County High auditorium. They were a cover band, but that's where they began honing their craft. And somewhere in those years, the guitar Matt had picked up as a teenager started producing songs of his own. The people who heard them remember the same thing: being startled by how good they were. By the spring of 2008 the first rough cuts were making their way to the rest of them — an early demo of “Confession's Not for You” among them. Matt called it our song, not his.
The songs moved with him. Matt landed in Atlanta, sharing an apartment with Jason, Jason's brother Josh, and their cousin Thomas. When the apartment gave way to a house — 5625 Colton Drive, with a basement fit for a band — jams turned into rehearsals, and rehearsals turned into a decision: these songs deserved a stage. That basement is where the earliest version of “Old and Grey” was cut, and where the band would keep coming back for the next four years.
The stage turned out to be The Loft in Columbus, GA, at a 2009 songwriter showcase. One problem: no drummer. So Matt made one — his younger brother Adam, a Georgia Tech student living across town in the Sixth Street Apartments on campus, got a pair of sticks and a two-week crash course from Matt and Jason. With Michael Clements on guitar, they were the only full band on a bill of solo acts. They won the whole thing. That night is the reason the rest of this page exists.
From there it became real. Adam moved into the house for his last year at Georgia Tech — three of the band under one roof — and it became regular practices, demos sent to venues around Atlanta, and a name: The Dirty Souls. By 2010 there was a circuit: Vinyl on West Peachtree in April, Lenny's on DeKalb Avenue in May, the Star Bar in Little Five Points in July, the EARL in East Atlanta Village by August. The songs came from Matt — he provided the lyrics and melody — with each player shaping his own parts around them. When Michael moved on, the band found Alex Slinin through a Craigslist ad and were blown away on the spot. Berklee-trained and a sound engineer by trade — with credits including Dr. Dre's The Chronic 2001, where he's in the liner notes, name misspelled and all — Alex brought theory and technical prowess to match Matt's raw creativity — and plenty of ideas of his own. With Alex on lead, the band spent 2011 in the studio — Real 2 Reel down in Jonesboro, Killybegs across town, and the Colton Drive basement for “Old and Grey” — and released its EP, We're Called The Dirty Souls, in 2012.
The record got its release show that December at 10 High, and it was a gift from someone else's band. Steve LaBate — an Atlanta music writer whose own group, Dirty Hotel Sunshine, had shared a Smith's Olde Bar stage with them that August — was assembling a bill for December 6th. Told the band's own release date had fallen through, he wrote back in one line: “Nice… we can bill it as your EP release show!” He did it three times in the end — the Smith's night that August, the release show in December, and the Old Fourth Ward Fest bill at the Masquerade the following May.
The Highland Inn Ballroom in Poncey-Highland became something close to a home room — it hosted some of the band's best Atlanta nights, and its courtyard produced their first real promotional photographs. Smith's Olde Bar in Midtown kept booking them from 2011 straight through to 2015. There was Vinyl, 10 High in Virginia-Highland, 529 down in East Atlanta Village, the Drunken Unicorn tucked in behind MJQ on Ponce, and in May 2013 the Old Fourth Ward Music UnFest at the Masquerade — back when it was still on North Avenue in the old DuPre Excelsior Mill, its three stages stacked as Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. A month after that they drove down to play The Loft in Columbus a second time — the room where it had all started, in the corner of Georgia three of them came from.
When life eventually pulled Alex toward his growing family, the band found Mike Gracey in 2014 — and knew right away he fit. He meshed from the first rehearsal, and by that summer The Dirty Souls were back in the studio at Wizkid Sound, cutting new songs — six of which never made it out the door.
Those sessions pulled in help from outside the band. Patrick Rusert had been playing pedal steel with them live, the Highland Inn Ballroom night most of all, and was meant to be on the record too — but by 2014 he had small children at home and couldn't make the dates. He sent a friend in his place: Dave Lamar James, who played keys and organ on “Shadow of a Doubt” and “Need Your Love.” The two of them knew each other from the Slim Chickens Honky Tonk Extravaganza, a country covers night they played once a week at the Star Bar — a real band up there backing whoever got up to sing. Adam had stood in that room and been floored by them years before, with no idea he was watching a man who would end up on a Dirty Souls record.
Music wasn't just Matt's stage life. He taught it — private lessons for kids, a summer camp, recitals where nervous first-timers got to feel what he'd felt at The Loft. The kids adored him, and he was good for them in ways that went past the instrument: he taught confidence. Anyone who watched him with his students understood that music was never just something Matt did. It was something he gave away.
Matt passed on September 1, 2016. Nine days later, at his mother's request, Alex sent the family a recording of Matt alone with an acoustic guitar, singing “Take Me Home.” And the songs never really stopped: as late as 2019, Alex was still quietly working on mixes of the unreleased material.
Ten years later, they're finishing what they started. The last seven songs the band recorded together come out as one record, with everything they earn going to a scholarship in Matt's name at the high school where it all began. And there's more still coming — earlier recordings, footage nobody has seen, whatever else turns up. This part is finally done. The archive isn't.