Bourgeois Guitars

Dana Bourgeois built his first guitar in a Bowdoin College dorm room in the early 1970s, working from Irving Sloane's construction manual, and opened a small repair-and-build shop in Brunswick, Maine after graduating. Immersed in the region's folk and bluegrass scene, he began working with players who sharpened his ear — among them Tony Rice, whose blunt feedback pushed Dana toward the clarity and balance a great flatpicker needs. In the 1980s he collaborated with fingerstyle pioneer Eric Schoenberg to revive the Orchestra Model; their Schoenberg Soloist, built in partnership with C.F. Martin, helped bring the OM back to prominence. By the time he consolidated his own operation as Pantheon Guitars in a Lewiston mill in 2000, Dana's name was already well known among players who cared about tone. The Bourgeois voice is hard to put in words and easy to recognise: dry, strongly fundamental, and disinclined to show off — a guitar that rewards the player who sits with it. The bluegrass flatpicking world in particular has treated Bourgeois as a quiet institution, the choice of players who could pick anything. Bryan Sutton's limited-edition dreadnought, a re-creation of his 1997 D-150 with "Banjo Killer" double-scalloped bracing, is among the best known. Every top is still hand-voiced by ear — today by Dana and master luthier James Witkus, who oversee the voicing and tonewood selection on each guitar — over the shop's signature scalloped X-bracing, often with torrefied "Aged Tone" woods that give a new instrument some of the openness of a decades-old one. In 2019 Bourgeois entered a strategic partnership with the Eastman Music Company. Rather than a handover, Dana retained an ownership stake and stayed on as CEO, and he and the original team kept building in Lewiston as before; the partnership's main effect was to widen distribution and add capacity. It also introduced the Touchstone series — a more affordable line assembled and finished by Eastman to Bourgeois specifications, with Bourgeois-voiced tops and final setup — which sits apart from the hand-built Lewiston guitars. Those flagship instruments still leave the shop individually voiced rather than spec-built, with a build queue measured in months: small enough to feel personal, large enough that one can actually be found.