Show Boat is a musical in two acts with music by Jerome Kern and book (based on a novel by Edna Ferber) and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. One notable exception is the song "Bill", which was originally written for Kern in 1918 by P. G. Wodehouse but reworked by Hammerstein for Show Boat. Two other songs not by Kern and Hammerstein — "Goodbye, My Lady Love" by Joseph Howard and "After the Ball" by Charles K. Harris — are always interpolated into American stage productions of the show.
Show Boat is based on a best-selling 1926 novel of the same name by Edna Ferber. Ferber spent several weeks on the James Adams Floating Palace Theater in Bath, North Carolina, gathering information for the novel about the disappearing American phenomenon: the showboat. In a few short weeks, she gained what she called a "treasure trove of show-boat material, human, touching, true." The setting for the musical version was mostly the Mississippi River, much traveled by real show boats in the nineteenth...
full article at wikipedia
