Bluegrass is more than a job for Rhonda Vincent

By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer SPRINGFIELD

Rhonda Vincent never left her patch of Missouri.

She did, however, finally leave Greentop (pop. 412) for the county seat, Kirksville (pop. 17,304).
You might bump into her at Walmart. Might run into her in the chip aisle at the Hy-Vee.
That’s fine and all if you want to stick around and plan stuff like class reunions, but is Kirksville, Mo., really any place for a monarch?
“You’re 100 miles from a mall,” her royal highness revealed this week. “You go back in time when you go there.”
And that is why, for the anointed queen of bluegrass, Kirksville is to Vincent I what Buckingham Palace is to Elizabeth II.
It’s good to be queen — but Vincent, the bluegrass star who plays Kuss Auditorium on Jan. 16 with her band, The Rage, isn’t about to get all highfalutin about it.
“To me, it’s a way of life that’s evolved into a career,” she said. “I would be doing this no matter what.”
The truth is, she’s good.
She’s more than that, actually.
A decade ago, the Wall Street Journal deemed her the “new queen of bluegrass,” and mountain music entered into a new, Vincentonian era.
The Kraussian era was at an end.

Full story.