The FM dial spent the late 1980s and ’90s playing Wynonna Judd and Melissa Etheridge in adjacent lanes — one the unhurried, gospel-deep voice of modern country, the other rock’s most unguarded confessor — and now, for the first time, they’re sharing a stage. The pairing arrives at Bethel Woods on Sunday, June 28, as part of the Raised on Radio Tour, a co-headlining run that splits each night between two career-spanning sets and the songs that shaped both women before they ever cut a record of their own.
Two Catalogs, One Stage
Wynonna Judd needs little introduction in this part of the country. A five-time Grammy winner — most of them earned alongside her mother as The Judds, the duo enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame — she has been one of the genre’s most identifiable voices for more than four decades, and she returns to its heritage circuit each summer with the kind of authority only mileage produces. Etheridge brings a different lineage to the bill: a Grammy and Academy Award winner whose self-titled 1988 debut helped redraw the lines of mainstream rock, and whose songbook (“Bring Me Some Water,” the later “Come to My Window”) has aged into something closer to standard than nostalgia. She arrives this summer as a first-time nominee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2026 — overdue recognition that gives the tour an extra charge.
The premise — each artist’s own catalog plus the songs they grew up listening to — gives the night more shape than a typical co-bill. There’s a charitable thread running through it, too: for every ticket sold, the two have pledged $1 each to The Etheridge Foundation, which funds opioid use disorder research, and to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The Bethel Woods stop sits mid-route, between the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater on June 27 and Ohio’s Rose Music Center on June 30, on a tour that opened June 24 at Wolf Trap.
About the Venue
The roughly 16,000-capacity Pavilion at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts sits on the same Sullivan County hillside that hosted the 1969 Woodstock festival — history the venue wears with appropriate weight rather than as costume. The covered pavilion and its sloping lawn at 200 Hurd Road in Bethel make for one of the better warm-evening rooms in the Hudson Valley, and a bill this rich in radio memory is exactly the kind of night the place was built for.
Tickets & Show Time
Pavilion tickets range from $57.50 to $184.50, including taxes and fees, for a 7:00 PM showtime.