The Missouri Bootheel is the southeasternmost part of the state of Missouri, extending south of 36°30’ north latitude, so called because its shape in relation to the rest of the state resembles the heel of a boot. Strictly speaking, it is composed of the counties of Dunklin, New Madrid, and Pemiscot. However, the term is sometimes used to refer to the entire southeastern lowlands of Missouri located within the Mississippi Embayment, which includes parts of Butler, Mississippi, Ripley, Scott, Stoddard and extreme southern portions of Cape Girardeau and Bollinger counties. The largest cities in the region are Sikeston and Kennett.

The Bootheel along with the Oklahoma-Kansas-Missouri border near the 37th parallel north form the two biggest jogs in a nearly straight line of state borders that starts on the Atlantic Ocean with the Virginia–North Carolina border extending all the way to the tristate border of Nevada, Arizona and Utah.

When Missouri was added to the Union, its original border proposal was to be an extension of the 36°30′ parallel north that formed the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, which would have excluded the Bootheel. However, John Hardeman Walker, a pioneer planter in what is now Pemiscot County, argued that the area had more in common with the Mississippi River towns of Cape Girardeau, Ste. Genevieve and St. Louis in Missouri than with its proposed incorporation in Arkansas Territory. The border was dropped about 50 miles to the 36th parallel north. It follows that parallel about 30 miles until intersecting the St. Francis River, then follows the river back up to about the 36°30′ parallel just west of Campbell, Missouri.

Buddy Emmons (b. January 27, 1937, in Mishawaka, Indiana), is an American guitarist.

Emmons has been called "The World's Foremost Steel Guitarist" and his talent is greatly admired by fellow steel guitarists. His musical versatility spans genres such as country, swing, jazz, folk, and country-rock, and he has performed or recorded with a wide variety of vocalists and musicians including Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt, Ernest Tubb, John Hartford, The Everly Brothers, Ray Price, and Lenny Breau. His innovative musical stylings range from tasteful ballad accompaniment and classical music to be-bop jazz, big band swing standards, and Western swing. He has also made significant contributions to the design, development, and evolution of the pedal steel guitar as a musical instrument.

He was born Buddy Gene Emmons. When he was 11 years old, his father bought him a 6-string lap steel guitar and signed Buddy up for lessons at the Hawaiian Conservatory of Music in South Bend, Indiana, which Buddy dutifully attended for about a year. Buddy then began figuring out on his own how to play the country music he heard on the radio. Buddy has said that Jerry Byrd and Herb Remington were among his first major influences. By age 15, Buddy's playing had progressed considerably and his parents bought him a triple-neck Fender "Stringmaster" steel guitar, and he began performing with local bands in South Bend such as The Choctaw Cowboys. Bored with high school, he left at age 16 and moved with a boyhood friend to Calumet City, Illinois, where he was soon hired by Stony Calhoun to play in his band. At 17, he moved to Detroit to play with Casey Clark. During his stint with Clark, Buddy purchased a Bigsby steel guitar with pedals similar to the pedal steel guitar that Bud Isaacs had used on the Webb Pierce hit song "Slowly". (The pedals on a pedal steel guitar allow the player to change the pitch of one or more strings while playing the instrument.)

James Robert Wills (March 6, 1905 – May 13, 1975), better known as Bob Wills, was an American Western swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Considered by music authorities as the co-founder of Western swing, he was universally known as the King of Western Swing.

Wills formed several bands and played radio stations around the South and West until he formed the Texas Playboys in 1934 with Wills on fiddle, Tommy Duncan on piano and vocals, rhythm guitarist June Whalin, tenor banjoist Johnnie Lee Wills, and Kermit Whalin, who played steel guitar and bass. The band played regularly on a Tulsa, Oklahoma radio station, and added Leon McAuliffe on steel guitar, pianist Al Stricklin, drummer Smokey Dacus, and a horn section that expanded the band's sound. Wills favored jazz-like arrangements and the band found national popularity into the 1940s with such hits as "Steel Guitar Rag", "New San Antonio Rose", "Smoke on the Water", "Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima", and "New Spanish Two Step".

Wills and the Texas Playboys recorded with several publishers and companies, including Vocalion, Okeh, Columbia, and MGM, frequently moving. In 1950, he had two top ten hits, "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" and "Faded Love", which were his last hits for a decade. Throughout the 1950s, he struggled with poor health and tenuous finances, but continued to perform frequently despite the decline in popularity of his earlier music as rock and roll took over. Wills had a heart attack in 1962 and a second one the next year, which forced him to disband the Playboys although Wills continued to perform solo.

Bret Michaels (born Bret Michael Sychak, March 15, 1963) is an American musician, actor, director, screenwriter, producer and reality television personality. He first gained fame as the lead vocalist of the glam metal band Poison who have sold over 30 million records worldwide and 15 million records in the United States alone. The band has also charted ten singles to the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, including six Top 10 singles and the number-one single, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn".

Besides his career as lead singer, he has several solo albums to his credit, including a Soundtrack album to the movie A Letter from Death Row in which Michaels starred in, wrote and directed in 1998 and a classic Poison style rock album Songs of Life in 2003. Michaels has appeared in several movies and TV shows, including as a judge on the talent show Nashville Star which lead to his country influenced rock album Freedom of Sound in 2005. He starred in the hit VH1 reality show Rock of Love with Bret Michaels and its sequels, which inspired his successful solo album Rock My World. He was the winning contestant on NBC's reality show Celebrity Apprentice 3 and also featured in his own reality Docu-series Bret Michaels: Life As I Know It, which inspired his highest charting album as a solo artist Custom Built, reaching #1 on Billboard's Hard Rock list.