- published: 02 Oct 2011
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A panhandle is an American informal geographic term for an elongated arm-like protrusion of a geo-political entity, such as a subnational entity or a sovereign state.
The term "panhandle" derives from the analogous part of a cooking pan, and its use is generally confined to the United States. A term used elsewhere is salient, derived from military salients. While similar to a peninsula in shape, a panhandle is not surrounded by water on three sides and connected to a geographical mainland. Instead, it is delimited by a land border on at least two sides and extends out from the larger geographical body of the administrative unit.
The panhandle shape is the result of arbitrarily drawn international or subnational boundaries, although the location of some administrative borders takes into account other considerations such as economic ties or topography. In the United States, a protrusion with a less elongated shape is informally called a bootheel.
† This definition of the Florida panhandle includes the following counties: Bay, Calhoun, Escambia, Franklin, Gadsden, Gulf, Holmes, Jackson, Jefferson, Leon, Liberty, Madison, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, Taylor, Wakulla, Walton, and Washington.
Kevin Fowler (born ca. 1966 in Amarillo, Texas) is an American Texas Country artist. He has released five studio albums, and has charted three singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, including the top 40 hit "Pound Sign (#?*!)". In addition, he wrote Sammy Kershaw's 2003 single "Beer, Bait & Ammo", Mark Chesnutt's 2004 single "The Lord Loves the Drinkin' Man" and Montgomery Gentry's 2009 single "Long Line of Losers".
Fowler was the younger of two children. His father introduced him to country music when he was a child, and as a teenager Fowler also developed a liking for rock music.
He graduated in 1984 from Tascosa High School in Amarillo.
Long interested in making music, Fowler began piano lessons as a young child. When he was twenty, he realized that he wanted to seriously pursue a career in music and moved to Los Angeles, California, to attend the Guitar Institute of Technology. For the next year, he learned how to play the guitar and began writing songs.
After gaining a good knowledge of the guitar, Fowler left L.A. for Austin, Texas. He was a guitarist with the rock band Dangerous Toys in the early 1990s, but left to form his own Southern hard-rock band, Thunderfoot. In 1998, he left rock music all together to form a new band that would concentrate instead on Texas country music. Fowler and his new band earned themselves a weekly gig at Babe's on Sixth Street in Austin. Two years later, with no recording contracts, Fowler recorded and released his own debut album, Beer, Bait, and Ammo. This album sold over 30,000 copies in Texas, with the title track receiving a great deal of airplay. This song was popular enough that Mark Chesnutt began playing it in his live show, and Sammy Kershaw recorded it for one of his own albums.
John Paul Gimble (born May 30, 1926), better known as Johnny Gimble, is an American country musician associated with Western swing. He is an award-winning fiddle player and considered one of the most impressive fiddlers in the genre's history.
Gimble was born in Bascom, Texas, (east of Tyler). He began playing in a band with his brothers at age 12, and continued playing with two of them, George and Jerry, as the Rose City Swingsters. The trio played local radio gigs, but soon after Gimble moved to Louisiana and began performing with Jimmie Davis. Late in the 1940s, he joined Bob Wills's band, the Texas Playboys. With Wills, he played both fiddle and electric mandolin, and distinguished himself by using a five-string fiddle (most fiddles have four strings). He broke off to form his own group in 1951, performing as the house band at Wills's club, but rejoined in 1953 and continued to play with Wills until the early 1960s.
Gimble left the music business briefly, working in a barbershop and a hospital, until 1969 when he and Wills began recording together again. From this time on he enjoyed steady work as a session musician, including with Merle Haggard on his Bob Wills tribute album and Chet Atkins on Superpickers in 1973. The following year he took a cue from a song he wrote and performed on the Atkins' Superpickers album, Fiddlin' Around and recorded the first of ten solo albums, Fiddlin' Around. Since the late 1970s, he has won five Best Instrumentalist awards from the Country Music Awards and eight Best Fiddle Player awards from the Academy of Country Music. From 1979 to 1981, Gimble toured with Willie Nelson worldwide. In 1983, Gimble assembled a Texas swing group featuring Ray Price on vocals, and charted a country radio hit with "One Fiddle, Two Fiddle," featured in the Clint Eastwood movie Honkytonk Man. Gimble was also nominated for a Grammy award for his performance on the 1993 Mark O'Connor album Heroes.