Spirit of Peoria Riverboat
For several seasons in his semi-retirement, Ken Bradbury performed aboard the Spirit of Peoria, an authentically powered four-deck paddle wheeler that runs excursions from its Peoria landing northward to Starved Rock State Park and southward to St. Louis, with stops at Grafton, Florence, the Père Marquette Lodge, and the Land of Lincoln sites around Springfield. Along with food and scenery, every cruise offered passengers a full course of river history, ecology, and live music, and Ken was a regular part of that entertainment crew — typically working alongside songwriter and singer Barry Cloyd and riverlorian and tour director Brian "Fox" Ellis. The three of them shared the boat's "Boiler Deck" programs through the day: ragtime piano, calliope concerts, sing-alongs, and historical storytelling sets that wove river lore, Civil War history, the Underground Railroad, steamboats, and the songs of Americana into the rhythm of the trip.
Ken's journals from these seasons read less like a performer's log and more like a travel diary — affectionate, wry portraits of his fellow crew, the tour leaders, the bus drivers, and the passengers (New Zealanders, Swedes, Brits, Australians, and Germans among them), set against air-conditioner breakdowns, schedule chaos, glorious river mornings, and good prime rib. The cruises ranged from two-day Starved Rock overnights to three- and five-day runs down to St. Louis and the Gateway Arch, plus day trips and special "Land of Lincoln" and Hannibal excursions. The work was a genuine pleasure to him, owed in large part to the company: as he wrote, "the saving grace of most trips is that Barry, Fox and I genuinely enjoy each others' company."
The Program
A typical multi-day cruise featured rotating sets performed by Ken, Barry, and Fox, including:
- River Boat Tales and Tunes — Ken, Barry, and Fox (e.g. the Robert E. Lee program)
- Fun With Music — Barry and Ken
- History of Music — Ken and Barry
- Henry Detweiller / Steamboats in the Civil War — Fox and Ken
- Underground Railroad — Ken and Fox, with spirituals such as "Swing Low," "Joshua Fit de Battle," and "This Little Light of Mine"
- Calliope Concert — Ken solo
- Canoe Song and River Ghosts — Fox and Barry
- Solo sets including Barry on John Hartford, Fox on River Ecology and Audubon, and Ken on state songs and original material
Ken also brought original songs of his own into the mix, including "Spectacular," a song he wrote about the simple joys of being on the river, and "The Mule Song" and "The Mud Blues" drawn from his New Salem musicals Distant Thunder and Abraham.
The Boat and the River
The Spirit of Peoria is a 160-foot, 275-ton, four-deck paddle wheeler with a capacity of nearly 500 passengers, carrying neither propeller nor side thrusters — landings depend on the pilot, the maple wheel, and twenty-one feet of paddles. Its decks were organized as the Main Deck (dining), the Boiler Deck (entertainment, snacks, and open-air seating where the music programs were held), and the Texas Deck (open-air seating). Among the people Ken came to know on the river was Captain Alice Grady, an Illinois College history graduate turned riverboat pilot, about whom Ken wrote a feature profile, "Tiny Hands on a Big Wheel," celebrating one of the few women ever to pilot a paddle wheeler on American rivers.
Notes
These performances spanned multiple seasons (journals and schedules from roughly 2011 through 2014 survive), running the May-through-October cruise calendar. Rather than a single staged production, the Spirit of Peoria engagement was a recurring, season-long series of shipboard concerts and history programs performed as part of the boat's touring excursions.
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