Award-winning Nashville songwriter Anne E. DeChant teams with award-winning Alabama author Frye Gaillard for “Watermelon Wine: The Poetry of Americana Music,” a unique program of reading and song. In his award-winning book, Watermelon Wine, Gaillard maintains that great songwriters, like DeChant, explore the depths of the human heart with all the subtlety and feeling of our finest novelists and poets. Gaillard will present brief readings from his works, setting the literary context for Anne E.’s all-acoustic rendition of her songs. DeChant and Gaillard have appeared together at such diverse venues as Belmont University, Kimbro’s Pickin’ Parlor in Franklin, TN, the University of South Alabama, The Southern Festival of Books (Nashville TN), New Covenant United Church of Christ (Charlotte NC), NewSouth Book Store (Montgomery AL), The Alabama Contemporary Arts Center (Mobile AL), as well as Lakewood, Hoover, Ephesus and Woodbury Libraries.  They have also shared this program with The Hank Williams Boyhood Home and Museum in Georgiana, Alabama.

Frye Gaillard's latest book "A Hard Rain" is an NPR Best Books of 2018 selection; a sweeping analysis of a "decade of hope and tragedy and blood," detailing personal reflections on events that shaped the author in the '60s. Tour highlights include the Carter Presidential Library, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Newseum in Washington DC, the 92nd Street Y in New York, Brown University, the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, Duke, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, the Southern Festival of Books, the Virginia Book Festival and others.