American Melody

American Melody is the fourth of American Cruise Lines’ modern riverboats, handed over by Chesapeake Shipbuilding in Salisbury, Maryland in August 2021 as the thirteenth ship in the fleet. She is 269 feet long, 56 feet on the beam, draws about seven feet, and carries 175 guests in 91 staterooms, all outside, all with a private balcony, because inside cabins do not exist on this line.

She is not a paddlewheeler. The line runs four of those and they are a different product entirely: sternwheels, Victorian styling, a nod to the nineteenth century. The modern riverboats are the opposite, flat-sided, squared-off, contemporary, with a four-story glass atrium and a domed skylight up the middle of the hull and two elevators reaching all five decks.

What she is for

The Mississippi, specifically. She was drawn for that river and her seven-foot draft is the number that decides it. The other decisive piece of engineering is the bow: it opens hydraulically and puts out a retractable gangway, so she can nose into a riverbank and land 175 people where there is no dock, no pier and no port authority at all. On the Mississippi, where a good half of the interesting stops are towns with a levee and nothing else, that is what makes the itinerary possible rather than the other way around.

Aboard: the River Lounge for the daily cocktail hour and the evening program, the Storyteller Lounge, a Sky Lounge on top with the Sky Walk circuit outside it, a Bow Terrace for sitting forward under way, the Study for reading and cards, one restaurant with a single open seating and everything cooked to order, and the Back Porch Café for grilled lunches. Cabins run from 250 square feet for a single with a balcony to 615 for a Grand Suite. There is a fitness center and a guest laundry. There is no casino, no pool, no theater and no second seating.

Where she actually sails

The Mississippi system, all year, in three sizes of trip.

The standard weeks are the bulk of it. Memphis to New Orleans, seven or eight nights, in both directions and repeated month after month, Tunica, Cleveland, Vicksburg, Natchez, St. Francisville, Baton Rouge and Oak Alley, the lower-river route this whole class of boat was built to run. St. Louis to St. Paul is the other one, eight nights up the upper river through Hannibal, Muscatine, Dubuque, Winona and Red Wing. There is also a shorter round-trip out of New Orleans that takes in the antebellum stretch and comes back, which is the closest thing on her schedule to a short break.

The Arkansas is the interesting one. She is one of the three boats on the line’s new Tulsa-to-Little-Rock run, up the McClellan–Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System through Muskogee, Fort Smith, Van Buren and Dardanelle, and on her it is a standing part of the year rather than a novelty appearance. That is a working barge waterway with essentially no passenger history, and calling there at all depends on the opening bow; those towns have banks, not piers.

And she does the whole river in one go. The twenty-two-night Complete Mississippi River Cruise, New Orleans to St. Paul, is the longest thing in American river cruising, and it appears on her schedule a handful of times rather than regularly. The port list is simply every name above run together in sequence, Oak Alley, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, Greenville, Memphis, Cape Girardeau, St. Louis, Hannibal, Muscatine, Dubuque, Winona, Red Wing, St. Paul, three weeks, one direction, one embarkation. A fifteen-night version covers the same ground with fewer stops, and there are occasional Ohio River runs up to Pittsburgh by way of Louisville, Cincinnati and Marietta.

The change of scenery across a full-river voyage is the argument for it: live oaks and Spanish moss at Oak Alley at one end, limestone bluffs above Winona at the other, and a seven-night sailing can only show you one of the two.

Who she suits

Somebody who wants the Mississippi and is willing to let the length of the trip follow the ambition. She is unusually flexible for a boat of this line: a week between Memphis and New Orleans if you want to test whether river cruising suits you, an upper-river week if the lower one is already familiar, the Arkansas if you want somewhere nobody has written about, and three weeks end to end if you want the whole thing. All of it comes with a balcony, an American crew, no passport and no port formalities, and with the shore excursions, the drinks with meals and the gratuities inside the fare.

She is wrong for families, there is nothing aboard for a child and the average age is well past sixty, and wrong for anyone who needs a pool, a casino or a second restaurant. The Mississippi is a working waterway, so a fair share of what passes the rail is barge traffic, levee and industrial bank, with the best of the scenery concentrated on the upper river rather than spread evenly along it. And the twenty-two-night voyage in particular is not the trip to find out on: it is a grand voyage priced and paced like one, and three weeks is a long time to discover you would rather be somewhere else.