Does bluegrass itself limit the growth of Raleigh's Wide Open Bluegrass festival?

A week before the International Bluegrass Music Association brought its annual convention and music festival to Raleigh for the third consecutive year, six panelists and a banjo-playing host gathered at N.C. State's high-tech Hunt Library to discuss what, exactly, bluegrass is. They also wondered where it might be going.

When most people hear the word "bluegrass," of course, they think banjos and fiddles, mandolins and nasal vocalists. Or maybe they think of hillbillies and Hee Haw, pickin' and grinnin' and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. But these were experts, folks who had, like Charley Pennell, been studying and defining the genre for most of their lives or, in Tommy Edwards' case, playing it long enough to become a local institution.

Led by area impresario Hank Smith, for an audience of several dozen, the panel discussed Raleigh's long-running bluegrass history, from being the former home of Bill Monroethe patriarch of the genreto the role of area radio stations in the music's spread. Toward the end of the hour-plus talk, John Teerwho plays fiddle and mandolin in Raleigh's modern stalwart bluegrass-inspired act, Chatham County Linecompared bluegrass to a country club. There were some parameters and qualifications for entry into the bluegrass "club," he explained, but the form could be a gathering place at which people can rally and celebrate and have fun.

Teer's country club metaphor struck a nerve, at least with me. Since its popularization in the late 1940s, bluegrass and its closest stylistic cousinsold-time, country, folk, Americanahave been overwhelmingly dominated by older white men, stereotyped by a reputation for stuffy archaism. And many acts still popular in the genre don't sound so different from their decades-old predecessors. While many musical forms thrive on and pride themselves on change and progress, bluegrass can seem at times to vaunt its own hidebound nature. The clubhouse is off-limits.

But can bluegrass survive indefinitely that way? Can it catch the interests of successive generations if it won't let their new ideas into the fold?

For bluegrass, one hindrance to stylistic expansion is deference to tradition and definitionthat is, what is and, perhaps more important, what isn't bluegrass. For some, bluegrass pretty much ends with the likes of Monroe or Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Others are eager to expand and include elements of rock, jam-band improvisation or jazz. This squabbling is hardly new, says Alice Gerrard. In the '60s, Gerrard and Hazel Dickens formed what's widely considered to be the first female-fronted bluegrass group.

"I remember in Bluegrass Unlimited, in the very beginning of that magazine, there was this huge furor with letter-writing back and forth about whether the Osborne Brothers should have drums or electric bass or something in there," she recalls. "It was a heated argument, and that was in the 1960s."

Smith, more than four decades younger than Gerrard, notes the hypocrisy of those who lambast new styles of bluegrass but forget the genre's early reliance on innovation. His electric banjo rig and often-experimental approach to the instrument do not work so well for traditionalists, but that's not the point, he says.

"Flatt & Scruggs, Bill Monroethose are the guys that everybody emulates. They say, 'You have to play just like this, and if you don't, it ain't no part of nothin','" he explains. "But Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe were the innovators. Those guys were taking this music that hadn't really been done before and inventing it as they went along."

Sometimes, such innovators are well received by IBMA, essentially the governing body of bluegrass. The organization has championed the boundary-pushing banjo duo of Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn, for example, and the high-minded string quintet Punch Brothers. Last year, North Carolina's Kruger Brothers premiered Lucid Dreamer, a chamber music collaboration with the Kontras Quartet, during IBMA's conference. This year, they will present it at the Red Hat Amphitheater with the help of jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis.

But these are exceptions that prove the rule. Wander the roads of Raleigh during Wide Open Bluegrass' StreetFest, and many of the acts you see will offer such slight spins on standard fare that they may start to blur together. Even one of the main stage's headliners, the Grammy-winning Earls of Leicester, is a Flatt & Scruggs cover collective.

Jerry Douglas leads Earls of Leicester. If he looks familiar, it's not only because all of the IBMAs and Grammys he's won with his own band or as part of Alison Krauss' Union Station. He's played every IBMA convocation in Raleigh to date.

In fact, of the 16 acts taking the stage at the Red Hat Amphitheater this year, 10 have appeared in some context either on the headlining Red Hat stage or in a Raleigh Convention Center ballroom since 2013. Bands that perform at the conference showcases often ascend to the main stage, as with the Earls of Leicester and the Kruger Brothers this year. Others, like The Infamous Stringdusters and The Gibson Brothers, are repeated outright.

Turns out, at least in the case of IBMA, when governing bodies pick the talent, they tend to maintain a small corral rather than expand their reach. The self-codifying confines of Wide Open Bluegrass seem to hold it back the most: What could be a highly curated festival of new and classic talent turns into rehashed repeat appearances.

William Lewis is the executive director of PineCone, the local roots booster that's been responsible for booking the ticketed Red Hat shows and the free street festival. He's an IBMA board member, too. The booking priority, he says, rests mostly with who has a new project and who fits into the budget.

And though many names reappear from year to year, like Sam Bush or the Steep Canyon Rangers, the projects and performances are different, he promises. Bush played last year with an all-star jam lineup of Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, Jerry Douglas and others, yes, but this year he's headlining Saturday night with his own main band. And when the Steep Canyon Rangers took the stage in 2013, he says, they acted as Steve Martin's backing band. On Friday, they're performing without him.

But the band performed at Red Hat last year, too, in a mid-evening slot. Bluegrass can be so repetitious, these things can be easy to forget.

Such a self-reinforcing booking cycle does little to address the thorny issue of putting on a festival that isn't mostly attended by and featuring white people, especially men. Women have enjoyed better representation in bluegrass; as Smith notes, one of the most popular bluegrass acts right now is the all-female Della Mae. And Krauss, who headlines Friday night's sold-out show at Red Hat with her band Union Station, has more Grammys than any other female artist ever: 27.

But people of color still seem as though they're getting left behind, despite the banjo's history as an African instrument and bluegrass' interweaving connections with forms like the blues and gospel. For many roots organizations, the go-to band of color has been the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a relatively young outfit founded by Justin Robinson, Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons. The Drops, however, have never played IBMA. They've never really been a bluegrass band, either, though they did find favor among roots music audiences.

"If you wanted to show off the diversity of roots music or Americana music," says Robinson, "you really had only a few bands to choose from, us probably being the most prominent of them. We had more work than we knew what to do with, especially during Black History Month."

Hubby Jenkins, who stepped into the Drops lineup after Robinson's departure in 2010, says some people still consider the band a novelty. At his solo set in City Plaza during last year's Wide Open Bluegrass, Jenkins explained some of his songs' connections to black culture and social justice at large. From my vantage, the audience appeared visibly uncomfortable with the testimonial, but Jenkins' comments were a welcome rejoinder to the big, white elephant in the room.

"When I first got into the music, I didn't even know a lot of that. I didn't know it was black people who had invented the banjo and all that sort of stuff," Jenkins says. But the more he learned about black historysegregation, Jim Crow, the prison systemhe realized how much of that seeped into the music around which he'd built his life.

"If you're going to have an international bluegrass conference actually international, you can have a more direct connection. Have someone from Mali play," he offers.

In Raleigh, Lewis says IBMA is working to enhance a spirit of inclusion, particularly through the free street festival on Friday and Saturday. It's meant to "kick the doors open a little bit" on what he admits is a fairly insular industry event. Spearheaded by PineCone, the Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Raleigh Convention Center, this portion of World of Bluegrass is unique to Raleigh.

"We asked if we could offer some free portion of the festival to the public to promote the music, promote the musicians and just introduce the community to the diversity and quality of bluegrass," Lewis says. "A big, large, free event downtown can begin to break down those barriers, and you do see more color coming into the music."

This year, Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton and Gangstagrass help break the color barrier. The former is a legally blind picker and singer in his mid-20s, specializing in old-time music and blues; the latter bends bluegrass and hip-hop. That's not a lot, but any continued representation of people of color at such events can help encourage younger folks, says Robinson. He thinks the Drops' fame, for instance, helped make space for young people of color in these white-dominated arenas.

"There's a whole lot of black musicians that I don't know now. There was a time where I pretty much felt like I knew them all, or at least of them," Robinson says. "And that's certainly not true anymore. That's awesome."

Later, he adds, "If there aren't young people in the genre, then it will go away. It'll just become a museum piece."

By most accounts, the great hope for IBMAor, really, bluegrass at largeis youth and ideas, not just age and inherited history. Lewis and Smith point to staggering jumps in IBMA membership statistics since the organization relocated World of Bluegrass to Raleigh as signs that the city's enthusiastic welcome has reinvigorated a slumping institution. Attendance figures bear out a similar idea: From 2013 to 2014, overall attendance leapt from 140,000 to 180,000, or nearly 30 percent. This year could draw more than 200,000 people.

Despite all the growth and youthful energy, no one's looking to chuck the old guard to the curb so much as they are hoping to open the country club to new members.

"Having people that hold the line is a good thing," Gerrard says, "and then having the people that really want to experiment is another thing."

"It'll still be based in the same music, but we'll have a whole new element to it," Smith says. "There's all kinds of weird mash-up bands that try to combine hip-hop and bluegrass. While that's not necessarily in the [bluegrass] mainstream, it didn't exist 20 years ago."