Cody Matlock

Cody Matlock has made a living playing Atlanta for more than ten years, most of it at Blind Willie's and Northside Tavern.

Brad went looking for a local blues man and asked Gina and the live music junkies who to call. She said Matlock was her favorite. He turned up at the McBastard Studio for a Salty's Live Music session, took one look at the place and asked what it was, then explained his rule: a musician says yes to everything, because the one time you say no is the day somebody good comes looking for you. He had also seen his friend Kelsey on the show.

His first memory is his grandfather's piano. His grandfather died when Matlock was four, and around the same time his dad put a guitar in his hands, which he remembers vividly. Before that he was a kid who wanted a sound out of anything, up to and including the cat. Everything he plays now is blues based, but he will not call himself a blues artist, because telling people where you stand tells them how to make you fall. Say blues and you have turned off a room before you start. He says R&B, soul, funk, country, blues instead, and finds that people stick around. Trade For It, the song he played soft on the show, is going out as a single, and the next record is rolling. He cut the last one in Trey Landers' basement. His fiancee Erica does all of his album art, and the fan donations coming in through his site are going straight into a merch fund.

In 2019 a talent scout found him on Instagram and invited him to an American Idol audition. He was sixty or seventy people deep in a room where they called every name but his, and when he went up to the producer it became a whole thing with a clipboard, which he took as a sign he was getting different treatment. They flew him to New York for a sixteen hour shoot with a six in the morning call, and left two hundred and fifty singers standing outside on a walkway in October for three hours. He sang Donny Hathaway. Lionel Richie voted first and said no. Katy Perry said too much vibrato, made him sing the same song three times and a second song three more, then passed him for proving he was coachable. Luke Bryan told him his voice was warbly. In Los Angeles they told the singers not to practice in their hotel rooms, which is the detail he still cannot get over. He would rather sleep on the street and be allowed to play.

What he wants now is to tour, a different city every night, in front of people who have never heard him, because entertaining a stranger for the first time is the best part of it. He and Eddie Ninevolt ran a podcast called The Lowest Key and had Spike, the Blind Willie's bartender of some forty five years, on to tell stories. He has taken to roasting neighborhoods from the stage, playing Stone Mountain and going after Marietta, and the crowds love it. One day, he says, he will have a haircut and pants that fit.