Can bluegrass be true to roots?

Bluegrass fans set great store by tradition, and, unlike in other pop music forms, aging bluegrass musicians command a certain reverence. They can and do stay active and productive well into their twilight years. Witness the continued drawing power of Ralph Stanley, Charlie Waller of the Country Gentlemen, Jesse McReynolds and Doc Watson, to name just a few.

Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, made appearances right up to the year of his death, 1996. He and his band, the Blue Grass Boys, have served as a model for the entire bluegrass genre.

As bluegrass fans watch their icons age and, eventually, cross to that heavenly shore, it marks the end of the beginning of a distinctly American music form.

Does it also mark the beginning of the end?

Can music that draws so much on the past cope with the future?

Will it be stuck in the sounds of the mid-20th century, or can it continue to grow and merge tradition with innovation? Will it die with its fans, or will it continue to attract new fans? And if it does progress as a music form, will it in fact still be bluegrass?

These questions are part of a dilemma that has faced bluegrass from its earliest days.

Earl Scruggs, for example, a trailblazing banjo player, changed the entire face of the music. Yet his continual innovation and growth as a musician cost him his most productive partnership, with tradition-bound guitarist Lester Flatt.

This tension between tradition and innovation is crystallized by a new compilation CD, “The Essential Earl Scruggs,” released on Columbia/Legacy records to commemorate Mr. Scruggs’ 80th birthday this year.

Along about the second half of the second disc in this two-CD set, it strikes you that you’ve not only heard all of these songs before, but you’ve also heard people other than Earl Scruggs play them, imitating Mr. Scruggs’ banjo style note-for-note, right down to his trademark “shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits” ending.

This collection is the distillation of the American bluegrass lexicon, the gospel according to Earl.

Mr. Monroe’s influence is part of the history. He got Flatt and Scruggs together in his band in 1945 and rode them hard for three years before they took matters into their own hands, literally, and started their own group, the Foggy Mountain Boys.

Mr. Monroe is indisputably the father of bluegrass — he invented it. But Mr. Scruggs’ banjo took the infant musical genre on a three-finger roll. It’s hard to say what might have happened to bluegrass had Earl Scruggs not come along. But without question, it wouldn’t be the music form it is today without the Scruggs banjo.

Here it is, from his earliest days and first recording session with Mr. Monroe, through his success with Mr. Flatt — the set includes 24 songs from the Foggy Mountain Boys — and later with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Earl Scruggs Revue with sons Gary, Randy and Steve Scruggs. Here, reduced to 40 songs on two discs, is some 59 years of tradition laced with mind-altering banjo riffs and pure innovation.

“Earl’s Breakdown,” for instance, involved twisting the tuning pegs as a signature sound and led to the development and manufacture of new banjo tuners calibrated to more easily produce that solitary sound. Talk about innovation. Mr. Scruggs changed the instrument.

Here, too, is the first Top 10 country bluegrass single, “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” as well as some of the music that illustrates Mr. Scruggs’ wide-ranging musical curiosity — “I Shall Be Released,” by Bob Dylan, and “Some of Shelley’s Blues,” by Michael Nesmith.

Mr. Scruggs went to great lengths to try to fuse the traditional sounding string band with the emerging pop form of country rock. It led to the split with Mr. Flatt in 1969, reconciled just before his death in 1979.

The Flatt and Scruggs split dramatizes the fundamental issue that bluegrass confronts as it moves into the 21st century — the conflicting demands between traditional authenticity on the one hand and, on the other, the innovation and relevance necessary to attract new fans.

It’s worth noting here that bluegrass itself began as an amalgamation of old-time traditional country and country blues. Much like A.P. Carter’s family did with “traditional” country music in the early 20th century, Mr. Monroe “improved” mountain tunes in the 1940s to make them more palatable to a wider audience. Mr. Scruggs was a big part of that.

It’s no secret that bluegrass musicians tend to be older than their counterparts in rock and these days, sadly, country also. (Jazz has its own, analogous bloc of older musical purists and conservationists.) Nor is it surprising that bluegrass fans, like those of other genres, tend to identify with artists who resemble them.

Still, youth will be served, and bluegrass wunderkinds have emerged periodically over the decades to refresh the music. Mr. Scruggs himself joined the Blue Grass Boys at age 21.

There is no shortage today of such new blood. Chris Thile, for example, is a bona fide mandolin prodigy who burst on the music scene at age 12. He has earned wide acclaim with his band Nickel Creek and its two CDs, pushing the bluegrass envelope toward a sound that nods to tradition but also appeals to younger listeners. The recordings were produced by Alison Krauss, a bluegrass performer with exceptional crossover appeal herself.

Crossover is hardly a new concept. The very issue that split Flatt and Scruggs has divided bluegrass into camps from the very start. What is hard to fathom is why Mr. Scruggs’ jaw-dropping, innovative banjo style — hardly traditional — didn’t bring on this discussion back in the ’40s. Instead, he spawned wholesale imitation and laid down a whole new foundation for the bluegrass music form. Virtuosity, it seems, speaks for itself.

There are those artists and fans, fewer and fewer of them as time goes on, who claim to have grown up on bluegrass. And then there are bluegrass artists in the Scruggs mold who make no bones about living in the modern world and being influenced by pop music.

Del McCoury comes to mind.

A former member of the Blue Grass Boys (Mr. Monroe went through a lot of band members in his long career), Mr. McCoury now leads a Nashville-based band that includes his sons Robbie on banjo and Ronnie on mandolin. His latest “hit” (a relative term when it comes to bluegrass) was “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” from English songwriter Richard Thompson. Mr. Thompson made a name for himself as the leader of the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention, and his songs have long been a folk staple.

Bluegrass players seem to make news — and waves — when they import new material into bluegrass. This helped launch the Seldom Scene as a current, relevant, interesting and influential band in the 1970s.

While other bands were singing about mountain hollows, trains and log cabins, the Scene injected grassed-up versions of Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and the Eagles, among others, into the repertoire. But in deference to their bluegrass base, they also performed songs about mountain hollows, trains and log cabins.

Crossover cuts both ways. Country stars Ricky Skaggs and Dolly Parton have in recent years “gotten back to their roots,” producing bluegrass and bluegrass gospel music and bringing home with them many fans from their Nashville heyday. The Irish band The Chieftains has issued two “Old Plank Road” discs, combining their Celtic instruments with American bluegrass and country songs and artists.

The risk here is alienating fans, a vocal majority of whom still revere tradition and sneer at innovation. Many perceive these “experiments” as somehow diluting bluegrass or changing it into something altogether different, as not being authentic. They would have lined up behind Lester Flatt in his split with Earl Scruggs.

Current fascination with traditional mountain music as evidenced in the soundtracks of “Cold Mountain,” “O Brother Where Art Thou” and “Songcatcher” might herald an expanded market for unadulterated old-time bluegrass music. Del McCoury’s band, for example, has been adopted by the jam-band crowd, possibly as an outgrowth of this “Down from the Mountain” phenomenon. The band’s schedule lately has included festivals of the bluegrass and folk variety, as well as the Bonnaroo festivals, where the fans are more likely to be pierced and tattooed than gray-haired and retired.

But this is a recent development. Mr. McCoury has been performing since the 1950s, but only within the past five years has his music struck such a popular nerve. The same holds for Ralph Stanley. “O Brother” brought him a degree of fame he had never known outside of bluegrass circles.

Is it nostalgia or novelty? Perhaps a bit of both.

Will bluegrass survive in the 21st century? Without question. Many of these songs survived hundreds of years of oral tradition to pass into bluegrass, and the past 60 years mark merely the first two generations of bluegrass music.

But will the music continue to be bluegrass?

Will fans continue for generations to come to listen to the genre standards of Bill Monroe or Lester Flatt, just as people still stream to concerts featuring Mozart and Beethoven works that haven’t changed in centuries?

Or will bluegrass, like jazz, morph into newer sounds and different camps as the years go by?

Perhaps the next generation of fans will conclude that tradition and innovation in bluegrass are two sides of the same coin, equally necessary to the music’s survival.

Whatever happens, it all should make for some pretty interesting listening.