Big Top Chautauqua Under the Blue Tent
Near Bayfield, Wisconsin
On summer nights a huge blue and white tent glows on the ski hill of Mount Ashwabay just outside Bayfield. This is Big Top Chautauqua, and its music drifts down the slope under the stars. The tent stands at the base of the ski hill, three miles south of Bayfield off Highway thirteen, and it seats about nine hundred people.
The name reaches back to an old American tradition. The original Chautauqua began at Lake Chautauqua in New York in eighteen seventy-four, offering lectures, music, and adult education, and by the early nineteen hundreds traveling Chautauquas rolled from town to town under canvas tents. The modern revival came in nineteen eighty-six, when a permanent tent went up here.
It has presented original musical histories drawn from local stories alongside touring acts, and the tent grew into one of the most beloved performance venues in the upper Midwest, hosting national touring acts alongside its own homegrown history plays. Tucked into the woods above a small-town ski hill, it is one of the more unlikely great stages in the country, and on a clear night the sound carries a long way over the water. Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez, and Lyle Lovett have all played under that canvas.
It is a nonprofit, and a weekly radio program called Tent Show Radio airs recorded highlights from past seasons.
