Showboat

The Music City Queen on the Cumberland River, Nashville.

A showboat was a form of theatre that travelled along the waterways of the United States, especially along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

British-born actor William Chapman created the first showboat, named the "Floating Theatre", in Pittsburgh in 1831. He and his family performed plays with added music and dance at stops along the waterways. After reaching New Orleans, they got rid of the boat and went back to Pittsburgh in a steam boat in order to perform the process once again the year after.

Showboats had declined by the Civil War, but began again in 1878 and focused on melodrama and vaudeville. Major boats of this period included the New Sensation, New Era, Water Queen, and the Princess. With the improvement of roads, the rise of the automobile, motion pictures, and the maturation of the river culture, showboats declined again. In order to combat this development, they grew in size and became more colorful and elaborately designed in 1900's. These boats included the Golden Rod, the Sunny South, the Cotton Blossom, and the New Showboat.

Jerome Kern's musical comedy Show Boat (1927) and its film versions (1929, 1936, 1951) showed this type of theater.

Showboating

Based on the gaudy look of showboats, the term "showboat" also came to mean someone who wants his or her ostentatious behavior to be seen at all costs. This term is particularly applied in sports, where a showboat (or sometimes "showboater") will do something flashy before actually achieving his or her goal.

Oft-cited examples of showboating include Leon Lett's grocery-bag-carrying of a recovered football (which he then had swatted out of his hand before the goal line) in the Super Bowl, and Lindsey Jacobellis's grab of her snowboard which caused her to crash right before the finish of the Snowboard Cross final at the 2006 Winter Olympics, costing her a first-place finish.

Showboat

Showboating

See also