Have you ever been to a tent show? Not a circus, but a real, live theatrical performance, complete with orchestra, magic, and vaudeville acts—all under a giant tent?
If you lived in rural America in the first half of the 20th century, chances are you would have attended more than once.Tent shows traveled from town to town with their huge tents and a full cast of characters and crew. They’d arrive in a town, recruit local men to help erect the tent, and stay for three days to a week, with new shows each night. Tent sizes varied, but many were 60 feet wide by 145 feet long and seated up to 1,500, with one reported to hold 4,000 people.
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| Interior of a Bisbee's Comedians' tent |
For a dime or a quarter, families could enjoy an entire evening of live entertainment. Then a few days later, the whole thing disappeared down the road.
One popular tent show troupe was Bisbee’s Comedians, which played throughout Kentucky and Tennessee from 1928 to 1966. The troupe performed year after year in Cadiz, Kentucky.
Imagine the excitement when those trucks rolled into a small town where entertainment options were few. Before long, local men were helping raise an enormous canvas tent, musicians and actors were unloading equipment, and children gathered to watch the activity. For a few nights, the town had its own theater.
I wanted to capture some of that excitement when my heroine, Naomi, visits Cadiz in my novel Moonshine River:
Even from this distance, the canvas structure looked bigger than any building she’d ever seen. Men and boys crawled like ants around the outsides, tugging on ropes and pounding stakes into the ground. As she watched, the top of the tent stretched still higher until a man called, “Hold!” Four burly men scrambled to tie off the ropes. As others were able to let go of the ropes they’d been pulling, they stood back and stared up at the monstrosity.
Nearby sat six cargo trucks, each one painted with the name “Bisbee’s Comedians” in red and black letters. People crisscrossed from the trucks and cars to the tent, carrying chairs and other items needed for the show.
Naomi watched a chubby man with red hair and freckles wander among the onlookers. He shook hands with a man and woman, tickled the little boy with them, and said something that made them laugh. Then he hitched his pants above his waist, grinned, and moved on to another family.
Meet Toby
The freckled-faced man was a character known as “Toby,” a fixture with traveling tent shows. Sometimes the shows were even referred to as “Toby Shows” because of his popularity. A country bumpkin with red hair, freckles, blacked-out front tooth, ragged clothing and homespun humor, he was instantly recognizable. Hitching up his britches, he would employ slapstick, winks, facial contortions and theatrical gymnastics that delighted the audience.
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| Lawrence "Boob" Brasfield played Toby with Bisbee's Comedians. |
One actor who played Toby, and was sometimes called the “King of Tobys,” was Lawrence “Boob” Brasfield, who toured with the Bisbee company. One magazine article said, “Boob can just roll his eyes or look out over the crowds with his expression that has ‘vacancy’ written all over it, and he brings down the house.” He was a master at spontaneous aside-to-the-crowd remarks and ad libs.
A Night Under the Big Tent
Jess Bisbee founded his traveling show in 1928. He was the son of a circus and vaudeville magician, and had performed in several vaudeville shows as a magician and with Ringling Brothers Circus as a musician. The troupe was advertised as Zarlington and Bisbee Comedians, then Bisbee and Zarlington, then Bisbee-Nero’s Comedians, and finally as Bisbee’s Comedians for most of its existence.
The company toured from April until late November, primarily in Kentucky and Tennessee. Winter quarters were in White Station, Tennessee, now part of Memphis.
The shows promised family-friendly entertainment. Jess Bisbee said, “The people we show to like a play that has a story with laughs. They don’t go much for pure slapstick, but they do want good, clean laughs. And they even like an occasional tear with their laughs. That’s what we try to give them.”
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A sensational ad in the Fulton, Ky., newspaper captured attention. |
Ticket prices in the early years were 10 cents—promoted as “Depression Prices,” with reserved seats available for an additional 10 cents “If U Want ‘em!” In later years, the price increased to 25 cents. Commonly, a lady would be admitted free on Monday night with one paid adult ticket.
Newspaper advertisements and articles touted the show. In 1934, a news article claimed Bisbee’s was “one of the best shows of its kind on the road at the present time.”
Plays presented by Bisbee’s over the years included such titles as “Chickens,” billed as “a riotous three-act comedy,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and “My Blue Heaven.”
Besides Brasfield, featured artists included Mahala, the Master Magician, and Roenro, “one of the most outstanding jugglers of the present day stage.”
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Jess Bisbee as Mahala, the Master Magician, used a large circular saw in his act to "cut" a woman in half. |
Bisbee’s typically returned to the same towns every year and were eagerly awaited. Some years, inclement weather took its toll—although the ads typically proclaimed the show would be in a “waterproof tent.”
When the Tents Came Down
At their peak in the early 1900s, there were an estimated 700 to 800 traveling troupes. An article in the New York Times in 1927 stated, “the canvas playhouses of the country now constitute a more extensive business than Broadway and all the rest of the legitimate theatre industry put together.” Even as late as 1949, the Times reported the tent shows would bring “drama and variety to 15,000 communities,” playing to a total audience of over 75 million.But the entertainment industry was changing. With the advent of television, popularity of the tent shows declined. In Kentucky, where once there were as many as 15 traveling companies, the Courier-Journal reported in 1948 that Bisbee’s was “the only three-act comedy-and-drammer [sic] tent show left in the South.”
However, upon its return to Cadiz that year, more than a thousand customers crowded into the tent. Joe Creason said it was “a crowd almost equal to the population of the Trigg County seat. People were wedged shoulder to shoulder in the ‘roost,’ that unreserved-seat section in the back of the tent.”
Jess Bisbee died in 1955, and Billy Choate, who had been traveling with Bisbee’s since 1942, acquired the company. By 1964, Bisbee’s Comedians was one of only two remaining tent shows. The last season was in 1966, when Choate attempted to keep going by setting up at a Kentucky resort for the whole summer.
In Parsons, Tennessee, however, a volunteer organization strives to preserve and continue the Toby Show experience. The Parsons Arts Council is the caretaker of what is believed to be the last remaining repertory tent company, donated to them in 2006. The collection includes a 45-by-90-foot tent, three 1942 stake trucks, hundreds of original scripts, costumes, century-old painted drops, blue folding chairs, and other “necessities of the road.” An associated group, the Rivertime Players, gave several performances in 2026 of “A Tribute to the Tent Show Troupers.”
It’s hard today to imagine a traveling theatrical company attracting an audience nearly as large as the population of the town itself. But for generations of rural Americans, the arrival of the big tent meant several nights of music, laughter, drama, magic—and, of course, Toby.
Have you ever attended a tent show? Or did your parents or grandparents ever tell you about one coming to town?
Sources:
A History of Tennessee Arts, “The Traveling Toby Tent Show”, University of Tennessee Press, September 30, 2004
She'll break the law to save her mother. He'll uphold it to save her soul.After her father’s sudden death, Naomi Ross is left with an impossible choice: let her ailing mother go without desperately needed treatment—or take over the illegal whiskey business she never wanted.
Then Cullen Downs comes home.
Naomi has loved the preacher’s son since childhood, but Cullen is no longer the young man who left Golden Pond. Disgraced by his own mistakes, he’s returned determined to reclaim his faith and fight the liquor trade that nearly ruined his life.
That puts him squarely against the woman he can’t seem to stop loving.
With Prohibition crumbling and danger closing in from moonshiners, a corrupt lawman, and Chicago gangsters, Naomi’s desperate choices threaten more than her freedom. They could cost her Cullen—and the future she never dared believe could be hers.
In the rugged hills of Depression-era Kentucky, two people on opposite sides of the law must discover whether love can survive betrayal, whether good intentions can justify wrong choices, and whether God’s grace is big enough to redeem them both.
