The only thing more Southern than sweet tea, Saturdays full of SEC football and crawfish festivals is some good ‘ol soulful, blues-inspired country music. Real Southern tunes are those that tug at your heart strings while making you want to dance and sing along. Kathryn Scheldt’s latest album, “Southern Girl,” does just that.

Just like its songs, “Southern Girl’s” origin has a story to tell. According to Frye Gaillard, University of South Alabama writer-in-residence, the seed for “Southern Girl” was planted last fall. Gaillard and Scheldt co-wrote 10 of “Southern Girl’s” 13 songs. Scheldt wrote the first three songs before the pair officially began collaborating.

Scheldt explains how she pushed Gaillard into teaming up with her for “Southern Girl.” “For my last record, I used the title from one of his books, With Music and Justice for All,” she said.

Scheldt felt the need to contact Gaillard and tell him she borrowed his title, which put the two in contact, although, Gaillard said, “Kathryn and I met back in 2005 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It wasn’t long after Hurricane Katrina and we heard this incredible solo she’d written with Kent Rush, another songwriter from Daphne.”

The song was called “Mercy Send a Dove,” and was about compassion in the face of disaster. Despite being hard of hearing, Gaillard’s mother was extremely moved by the song. The song was so real and authentic that Gaillard, his wife and his mother waited to compliment Scheldt after the service. When Gaillard’s mother passed away, Scheldt was asked to sing at the funeral, and that’s when they began collaborating.

Gaillard, author of “Watermelon Wine: Remembering the Golden Years of Country Music”, is a sharp writer with a clear, honest voice who has done his research on the nature and evolution of country music. Collaborating with country songstress Scheldt seemed like a natural fit, except Gaillard didn’t see himself as anyone’s poet.

“He said, ‘I don’t rhyme’.” Scheldt knew it would take a little arm twisting to get Gaillard fully on board for “Southern Girl.”

“Kathryn played those (first few) songs to me just to get my reaction to them. I thought they were good songs, so I said, you know, these songs ought to be the heart of your next CD, which should be called ‘Southern Girl,’ and it should be both Southern and female. A woman’s kind of view,” he said. Scheldt wasn’t so sure at first.

“Frye, these are pretty rockin’ and bold. You think I can come out with this kind of stuff?” asked Scheldt referring to her lyrics’ deep subject matter.

“They weren’t shocking; just real…emotions,” Gaillard replied. Gaillard’s experiences in literature predisposed him to look at the stories in music.

“I had written enough about music that I could think of it that way. Conceptually, I could think of what holds an album together,” he said.

Knowing she had Gaillard’s interest, Scheldt once again asked for help writing a song. “I had an idea for a song. The idea was words get in the way. So, I challenged Frye to that, and then we started writing together,” said Scheldt.

Prior to this involvement, Gaillard contributed “a word here or there” to “With Music and Justice for All.” “With ‘Words Get in the Way,’ I wrote the chorus, and Kat wrote the lyrics. It bowled me over that I wrote four lines. It was like cocaine; I was hooked,” recalled Gaillard.

Gaillard was hooked, but Scheldt didn’t fully reel him in until after a performance at St. Bridgette’s Catholic Church in Prichard. In front of “the church, which was established in 1867, is a historical marker that says ‘the famous railroad engineer, Casey Jones, was Baptized in this church.”

“I’d heard the legend, but I didn’t know ‘Casey Jones’ was real,” said Gaillard referring to a children’s song written by Willis Saunders that was sung about Jones’s bravery in the face of death.

“With Frye being a historian, I saw this as a way to snare him in. We started Googling and sending messages back and forth,” Scheldt said.

Eventually, Scheldt and Gaillard produced the bluesy folk ballad “Casey in Love,” which was their first-ever full-fledged writing experience. The song tells the story of the swashbuckling Casey Jones who got baptized because he wanted to marry a Catholic girl. Jones had worked in the railroad yards in Mobile, and according Gaillard, “What you could tell from reading his life story, he was hooked on the adventure of driving trains and going fast and wandering around. On the other hand, he was in love with this woman, and as they began to have a family and have children, there was this fundamental tension in his life.”

How the song ends, well, you’ll have to listen to find out, but it is indeed epic.

After “Casey in Love,” the talented twosome were off and running. They “wrote frantically,” penning nine-and-a-half songs between February and April 2009. “Southern Girl” was recorded partly in Nashville and partly in Daphne.

Of their finished product, Gaillard said, “Mercifully, I don’t sing anything. I just help write it, and I did help produce it. I made decisions about the order of the songs. Every song was written to stand alone. Some people feel like they know Kathryn afterwards. It’s a woman’s perspective on things.”

According to Scheldt, her album’s title cut is about wanting to be kidnapped to escape. . Why? “I think there’s a Southern girl in every woman. That’s where I’m coming from with it,” said Scheldt.

Gaillard acknowledges his role in co-writing an album from the feminine perspective was a unique one. “I don’t know how to account for that, but it’s just a really interesting thing to do…try to get inside of the head of someone from a different gender. But it’s not totally different than what you do as a journalist. You try to get into the head and story of someone who’s not you,” said Gaillard, relating his experiences with “Southern Girl” to his experiences as a professional journalist.

Scheldt said of working with Gaillard, “It’s natural. Very natural. I’d send some things to him, and I’d be like ‘can I really share this with somebody’?’”

The song “Every Shade of Blue,” for example, was about a nightmare Scheldt had. Scheldt said she heard the tune and wrote it down.

“It all came to me. This one came like a crash of thunder.”

“Kathryn sent me the lyrics in an email and said ‘this is a nightmare I had last night, and I just wrote.’ I sort of shaped it a little bit, but it was basically this sort of thing that apparently you woke up and wrote it down.” Gaillard said.

“Every Shade of Blue” was finished by e-mail, which is how a lot of songs were worked on because the partners live on opposite sides of Mobile Bay.

Of having Gaillard on the other end to listen to ideas, Scheldt said, “it would have stayed in my journal, but I could share it with him. He gave me a lot of courage to voice my own truth.”

Equally grateful of Scheldt’s help in engaging him with songwriting, Gaillard said, “I wouldn’t be doing this at all if it weren’t for Kathryn’s encouragement. It’s an art form I’d always admired and enjoyed, but it literally never occurred to me to do it myself until she and I started working together.”

Gaillard and Scheldt acknowledge that their commonality, being Southern is part of what makes “Southern Girl” such an honest album.

“We have a relationship with where we’re from,” Scheldt said.

Gaillard and Scheldt agree the album is a healthy expression of a woman and Southerner’s point of view. There is a lot of Southern imagery in the album, but it’s healthy. There are a few passing mentions of the racial tensions in the South, a mention of the Vietnam Era, which echoes today with the war in Afghan and Iraq.

Ultimately, the album is about relationships, life and feelings.

“It leaves people feeling good, not bad, but it does make its excursions through sadness,” Gaillard said.

“It lets people know it’s OK to have feelings. It’s life,” Scheldt added.

“Southern Girl” was officially released on Oct. 4 at the Fairhope Unitarian Fellowship. Scheldt was accompanied by Tom Morley of Mithral, Corky Hughes, Jimmy Roebuck and Fred Baldwin. Morley is also the violinist and fiddle player for the album.

Also on the album are a panoply of talented musicians: Catherine Styron Marx, Mike Severs, Pat Severs, Denny Walley, Kerry Marx, Richard Scheldt, and Peter Cooper.

Although the original band from the album won’t be with Gaillard and Scheldt during their current tour, Scheldt does perform with local artists, and Gaillard shares excerpts from his country-music inspired books “Watermelon Wine, With Music and Justice for All,” and “Some Southerners and Their Passions.”

For more information on Southern Girl or Gaillard and Scheldt’s current tour, contact Suzanne@newsouthbooks.com or jekman@usouthal.edu.