Spanbauer Barn. - Jerome, Idaho - restaurant reviews

Sunset, Sept, 1997 by Julie Fanselow

If it's Saturday night, the moon is flying high, ad the lonesome guitars are in tune, it must be time for the weekly hoedown at Spanbauer Barn near Jerome, Idaho.

Retired sugar beet farmers John and Marie Spanbauer have been throwing old-fashioned Western wingdings nearly every Saturday night for years. "You see people here you know have been dancing together all their lives," says John.

Like the Spanbauers, for instance. Married 56 years, they began their barn dances while ranching near Pocatello decades ago; in the 1980s, after moving to Jerome, the family began holding the dances in a barn at the end of a 5 1/2-mile gravel road. "You'd go in there at 8 o'clock in the wintertime and you weren't sure you'd get out," recalls Bob Loveland, a barn-dance regular for seven years. "But that didn't stop us from going."

Now, however, the hootenannies take place in an easy-to-find lava-rock barn with a dance floor of nearly 2,000 square feet. Dozens of couples two-step across the polished wood as soon as bandleader Dusty Sheets and his Nomads hit their first chords.

It's Western music, pure and simple - and nonstop, too, since Marie Spanbauer plays piano during the band's breaks.