Rhonda Vincent Unveils Her “Angel”: A Custom Bourgeois Guitar Destined to Soar at Silver Dollar City
On a crisp December morning in 2025, bluegrass royalty Rhonda Vincent did what she does best: she made 10,000 Instagram followers feel like they were sitting on her Missouri porch. Holding a gleaming new dreadnought aloft like a proud parent, the Queen of Bluegrass beamed, “It just arrived! My new Bourgeois Guitars ‘Angel’ guitar that will be featured in the angel segment of our Christmas show at Silver Dollar City.” In that single post, a holiday tradition just grew wings.
The guitar itself is a masterpiece born of deep friendship and exacting craft. Hand-built in Lewiston, Maine, by luthier Dana Bourgeois and his small team, the instrument is a panoramic-cutaway dreadnought constructed from rare Adirondack red spruce and highly figured Madagascar rosewood. Its most striking feature is the inlay work that took master artisan Larry Sifel over 120 hours: a radiant angel with abalone wings spanning the entire fingerboard, her arms outstretched across the 12th fret as if blessing every note. The headstock bears a delicate mother-of-pearl “RV” monogram, while the pickguard is engraved “Angel of Music” glints under stage lights. Vincent calls it “the prettiest guitar I’ve ever laid eyes on—and the sweetest sounding.”
This isn’t just any signature model; it’s a personal talisman. Vincent has played Bourgeois guitars for two decades, but this one was commissioned after a late-night conversation with Dana at the 2024 IBMA Awards. “I told him I wanted something that felt like Christmas morning every time I picked it up,” she recalls. “He laughed and said, ‘Give me six months and you’ll hear heaven.’” True to his word, the guitar arrived the week of the final dress rehearsal for “An Old Time Christmas” at Silver Dollar City, where Vincent and her band The Rage headline 28 sold-out shows between November 8 and December 30.
The “Angel” will debut during the show’s most emotional moment. Midway through the two-hour spectacular, the stage darkens, snow falls from the rafters, and Vincent steps into a single spotlight to perform “Mary, Did You Know?” followed by her own composition “Christmas Angel.” For 2025, she re-wrote the bridge so the lyrics now reference “an angel made of spruce and rosewood” who “sings when human voices fail.” When she played the new passage for her band during rehearsal, mandolinist Brent Burke admits the entire group teared up. “It’s one thing to hear Rhonda sing about angels,” he says. “It’s another to watch her actually play one.”
Silver Dollar City audiences are already preparing for goosebumps. The Branson theme park’s 1880s-style Opera House holds 1,100, but demand is so fierce that the park added a second nightly performance. Fans who’ve seen early run-throughs describe the moment the Angel guitar rings out as “church-quiet,” followed by applause that shakes the rafters. One season-ticket holder posted, “I’ve heard Rhonda play ‘Go Rest High’ a hundred times, but when those abalone wings lit up and she hit that high G run… I forgot to breathe.”
The arrival also marks a sweet full-circle for bluegrass tradition. Vincent, a 2021 Grand Ole Opry member and eight-time IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year, has long championed hand-built American instruments. Bourgeois Guitars, revered in acoustic circles but still boutique compared to corporate giants, rarely does full custom inlays of this complexity. Dana Bourgeois himself flew to Missouri to deliver the guitar personally, spending an afternoon tweaking the action to Vincent’s lightning-fast flatpicking style. “Rhonda doesn’t just play bluegrass,” he said. “She is bluegrass. Building this felt like crafting a Stradivarius for a Mozart of the mountains.”
Beyond the stage, the Angel is already inspiring the next generation. Vincent plans to auction a limited run of ten signed replicas next December, with proceeds funding music scholarships through the Rhonda Vincent Foundation. Meanwhile, a children’s book titled The Angel Guitar—co-written with her daughter Sally Berry—is slated for 2026 release, telling the story of a little girl who hears an angel’s voice inside a special instrument.
As Silver Dollar City’s Christmas lights twinkle over Branson this season, one new star will shine brightest: a Madagascar-and-spruce angel cradled in the arms of the Queen herself. Rhonda Vincent didn’t just receive a new guitar. She received a voice for the part of her show where words fall short and only heaven can finish the melody. When that first crystalline note rings out on opening night, 22,000 hearts will understand exactly why she named it Angel—because sometimes the purest bluegrass doesn’t come from the hills. It comes straight from above.
