Bourgeois Guitars

Dana Bourgeois's name was famous in the boutique world before this shop existed. He apprenticed under Eric Schoenberg in the 1970s, voiced tops for Schoenberg and later for Pantheon, and earned a reputation as the guy whose ear could make a guitar sing. By the time he opened a shop under his own name in the mid-1990s, players were already lining up. The Bourgeois sound is hard to put in words and easy to recognize. Bryan Sutton plays them — his signature dreadnought, based on his personal D-150, is one of the shop's best-known instruments. The bluegrass flatpicking world especially has treated Bourgeois as a quiet institution — the answer when a player who could choose anything has to actually choose. There's a dryness to the voice, a strong fundamental, a certain refusal to be flashy. It rewards listeners who sit with the instrument rather than over it. In 2019 Eastman Music Company bought the shop, and the boutique world held its breath. The fear was the obvious one: corporate acquisition turning a hand-voicer into a brand badge. Five years in, that fear hasn't materialized. Dana and the original team still build in Lewiston, the Aged Tone series and Heritage and Touchstone lines extend the philosophy without diluting it, and the guitars still leave the shop hand-voiced rather than spec-built. The build queue is measured in months, not years — small enough to feel personal, large enough that you can actually find one.