They come to dance at the Ingomar jamboree

INGOMAR — In the long dance hall attached to the Jersey Lilly bar and cafe, people who weren’t dancing Sunday afternoon were generally watching the musicians — or the feet of people who were dancing.

There was plenty to see in either case. A steady stream of musicians — on the guitar, fiddle, bass, piano, and dobro — squeezed into the performance space on one end of the hall. As for dancers, most of them were in their 60s, 70s or 80s, but they waltzed, two-stepped and polka-danced across the well-worn wooden floors like people half their age.

Morris Ware, a 68-year-old cowboy who was born in Jordan and has lived in or near Ingomar since 1974, said he and his wife dance almost every weekend. They dance in places like Winnett and Cheadle, and they used to dance in Grass Range until the Wrangler Bar changed hands.

He said most everybody who attends these Sunday country dances are like him and his wife.

“They don’t go to parties,” he said. “They don’t drink — well, they might have a drink or two — but they like to dance.”

The music jamboree at the Jersey Lilly is a twice-annual affair, held on the last Sunday of April and the last Sunday of August. The dancing starts at noon and ends about 5. Musicians and dancers come from all over Eastern Montana and the nearer parts of North Dakota, driving on asphalt, gravel and dirt.

When the Jersey Lilly gatherings began, they were mostly accordion jams, with a few fiddles, guitars and pianos providing backup. In recent years the accordions have gotten rarer and rarer. The only one present Sunday was in the hands of Ann Schenk, and she mostly played second fiddle to her husband, Mike, a fiddler.

They live in Roundup now, but the Schenks grew up in Forsyth. Ann’s mother started teaching her how to play accordion and piano when she was 9. Mike always played harmonica, but he didn’t take up the fiddle until 20 years ago — when he was 60.

“We don’t play much anymore,” he said. “Her hand’s all twisted up and my hearing’s goin’ to hell.”

Nobody seemed too sure about when the Jersey Lilly started its jamborees.

Dorthy (yep, just the one “o”) Ley said the late Gil Carrington and Bonnie Stark started organizing the Ingomar jams “oh, gosh, years ago. I don’t even remember.” She thought maybe 12 or 15 years ago, and she’s been organizing them for years. But Walt Tadsen, a fiddle player from west of Forsyth, said he thought he’d been coming to the Ingomar jams for 25 or 30 years.

In any event, Ley said, there is something special about the Jersey Lilly jams.

“I don’t know what it is about Ingomar, but we bring out the best of the best,” she said.

They would include Ley herself, an accomplished piano player, and Benny Milks, a one-time professional fiddler from Malta now living in Billings. Also on hand Sunday were Harold (guitar) and Margie (bass) Matovich of Grass Range.

Richard Halvorson, a top-notch guitar player and singer, left Williston at 7 a.m. for the 270-mile drive to Ingomar, and he was driving back to Williston on Sunday evening.

“I don’t have to work until 6 in the morning,” he said cheerfully.

The Jersey Lilly was built as a bank in 1914, back when Ingomar, 110 miles northeast of Billings, was the capital of sheep country. It became the Oasis Bar in 1933, then was renamed the Jersey Lilly in 1948 by Bob Seward.

Seward, a Texan, named it after a bar of the same name in Langtry, Texas, that was owned by Judge Roy Bean. Bob Seward’s son, Bill, took over the operation in 1958 and ran it until 1995, when he sold it to Jerry Brown. Four years ago this month, it was sold to Boots Kope and June Nygren.

The brick bank building is now fronted with a porch and boardwalk made of faded barn wood, and the Jersey Lilly still has no indoor toilets, just a “bull pen” and “heifer pen” out back.

The dance hall used to be a mercantile store. It has a pressed-tin ceiling and walls adorned with deer, elk and antelope mounts, as well as framed photographs, newspaper clippings and old advertising signs. The room is heated by a 6-foot-tall Waterbury Special furnace that stands at the back of the hall.

Kope, who owns the Jersey Lilly with his wife, grew up on a horse ranch west of Cohagen and has been coming to the bar and cafe since he was a toddler.

“We took it upon ourselves to take it over and keep the legacy going,” he said.

The Jersey Lilly remains popular among tourists, who take Highway 12 between Roundup and Forsyth just to stop in at the landmark. Last year Kope and his wife saw people from Bangladesh, China, Hungary and Yugoslavia, among other countries.

“I think last year there were only four states that weren’t represented, and not everybody signs the guestbook,” Kope said.

Owen Badgett, another of Ingomar’s dozen full-time residents, wasn’t dancing or playing music Sunday. The cowboy poet and short-story writer —he’s working on his fourth book — was just hanging out.

His father was a “gypsy cowman,” meaning he ran his cattle on whatever ranch he was working on at the time, so Owen grew up all over the Powder River and Tongue River country. Badgett’s 67 now, and when he first came up to the area around Ingomar, there was still a lot of sheep.

“And there were some characters here,” he said, “some real characters.”

He rattled off a few names — Hoot Hedges, Johnny Dinsmore and Puppy Nygard. Asked to look at a reporter’s approximation of the spelling of the names, Badgett just shrugged.

“You can spell better than I can,” he said. “I ain’t gonna argue with you.”

Ley, the jamboree organizer and a resident of Miles City, said she’s put together jams all over the country, mostly in Eastern Montana and western North Dakota. She’s not sure how long the Ingomar jamborees will continue, acknowledging that “some of our people are getting older and can’t come anymore.”

She also acknowledged that it’s tough to interest young people in the jamborees.

“They think our music is oom-pah-pah music,” she said. “But our music is really good dancing music.”

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