Here Comes the Showboat!

by Betty Bryant

Dust Jacket - front:

This is a lovely book! This “Signed” book was published in 1994 by The University Press of Kentucky. The book measures 6 ¼ inches by 9 ¼ inches and contains xiii, 202 pages. The book is in “almost new” condition.


Front Cover/Spine


Title page


Title Page – Verso

Contents:

Series Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Cast, Bred on the Waters
Home Sweet Showboat
Lady Violet
The Four Bryants
The Play! The Play!
The Actors Have Arrived
Willie
Dead Men Tell No Tales
Up the Monongahela
Perennial Pals
Screeching Pipe of Pan
Down by the O-HI-O
Put Them All Together, They Spell “Huckster”
Then There Was Dad
Phone It In
Vic Faust
That Old-Time Religion
The Season Ends
Sweet Bird of Youth
The Right Place at the Right time
Cincinnati
A Lady and a Queen
Lure of City Lights
Ohio
Rainin’ and Risin’
Where Have All the Showboats Gone?
Showboats Chronology
For Further Information
Index


Front End Pages - Map


Excerpt – Dust Jacket:
Betty Bryant was a river rat. The Floating Theater was her home, and the river was her back yard. While other children were learning how to walk, she was learning how to swim. She knew how to set a trotline, gig a frog, catch a crawdad, and strip the mud vein out of a carp by the time she was four.

In this colorful memoir, Betty shares her own piece of Americana, the small, family-owned showboat of the early twentieth century. Billy Bryant’s Showboat pled the inland waterways of the Ohio River watershed from before the First World War until 1942., brining a blend of melodrama and vaudeville, laughter and therapeutic tears, into the lives of isolated people in rural communities along the way.

Betty made her first professional appearance at the age of six weeks when she played the baby in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In her twenty years of touring, she acted, sang, danced, and grew up in the tradition of “family entertainment, by families, for families…”
End excerpt


The Bryant Family
Josephine, Violet, Sam, Florence, Billy, and Betty


Top: The Hula
Center: Betty, age three, in costume for performing the black bottom
Bottom: Dressed to perform George M. Cohan’s Great Easter Sunday Parade


A visiting relative learning to use the draw bucket


Josephine at the calliope


Left: Josephine and Billy as Mehitable Cartright and Sample Swichel in Ten Nights in a Barroom

Right: Josephine Bryant and Gladys Cole


Top: Richard Costello (Betty’s maternal grandfather), Billy and a deckhand.
Bottom: Coaling up.


Betty selling tickets


Josephine, Betty, and Violet Bryant on the stage plank


Facsimile of a newspaper clipping - The end of the Old Billy Bryant Show Boat at the foot of Tenth street, is a matter of a few weeks…


Facsimile of Program

Price: $24.50
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