Town Mountain could be considered straight-up bluegrass to the uninitiated.

The Asheville, North Carolina, five-piece hews pretty close to tradition, especially when it comes to instrumentation: acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, double bass and not a drum in sight. And with three vocalists and driving forces within the band — guitarist Robert Greer, banjoist Jesse Langlais and mandolinist Phil Barker — the harmonies are there.

But the band, which also features fiddler Jack Devereux and newest addition Adam Chaffins on bass, has serious country and rock ’n’ roll DNA, as evidenced on its fourth studio album, “Southern Crescent.” When the band formed in the mid-2000s, its members bonded just as much over the Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson as Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. So does the group ever experience any pushback from more tradition-minded audiences?

“Sure, we do. Yeah, we do, and that’s the thing,” Greer said recently from Asheville, a day before hitting the road for a short Pacific Northwest tour that hits the Old Stone Performing Arts Center tonight. “… It seems like the further you leave the cradle of something — it’s the same way with Delta blues (in) Mississippi, it’s the same way with whatever type of music is from a specific area, you could pinpoint the epicenter of it, where it was born. It’s the same for those musics — the further you get from the cradle, you can get away with more things. You can just play.

“The best example I have is kind of like when Sam Bush and those guys first found Telluride, Colorado, in the ’70s, and they started telling their friends about this wonderful, magical place where Bill Monroe is not standing over your shoulder going, ‘That ain’t right, that ain’t right.’”

That helps explain why the band loves playing in Bend so much, and Oregon in general. The group played last year’s Northwest String Summit at Horning’s Hideout in North Plains and is a veteran of McMenamins’ Great Northwest Music Tours.

“I like the attitude — it’s pretty far from the epicenter of bluegrass out there,” Greer said. “It’s just kind of like, people are just music fans. They’re less worried about the rules of one genre or the next. They just want to hear some good music and be entertained.”

Like many young bluegrass pickers, Town Mountain’s members came to the style later on in life. Langlais, a native of Maine, picked up banjo after hearing the instrument in Dead tunes. Greer was exposed to the genre thanks to his father, a music fan and college administrator who would hire bluegrass bands to play end-of-year staff parties in Bard, North Carolina.

“From being a little boy and seeing that, that was really a lot of my extent of bluegrass. Old country and stuff, that was more prevalent in my family,” Greer said. “One of the main common grounds in music for us is the Grateful Dead. … So nobody’s really (from a) bluegrass family.”

After 11 years of hard touring, the bluegrass cognoscenti have taken notice of Town Mountain, traditional or not. In 2013 the group won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Momentum Award for Band of the Year, while Greer took the Momentum Vocalist of the Year title, on the back of the band’s 2012 album, “Leave the Bottle.” This year it’s up for IBMA’s Emerging Artist of the Year award, despite having formed 11 years ago.

“It’s weird; we don’t get it, but whatever,” Greer said, chuckling. “We’ve been nominated for that award a few times before — we were nominated last year and the year before. A couple years ago it seems like we really made a push on it, and last year we forgot to take our name out of the running.”

In a way the nomination makes sense. Langlais has said in past interviews (and Greer reiterated to GO! Magazine) the band “realized what (its) sound is” with this year’s “Southern Crescent.” The record’s 12 songs were written primarily by Langlais, Barker and Greer and find the band tackling familiar sounds — the rapid-fire picking of “St. Augustine” and the title track, the chugging country of “Comin’ Back to You” and rollicking album closer “Whiskey With Tears” — with a rawer feel than on past recordings.

While the previous two albums were also recorded live in studio, this time out the band took it a step further in an old-school direction, eschewing overdubs and noise mitigation techniques. Producer Dirk Powell, known for his work with Loretta Lynn, Tim O’Brien and Eric Clapton, helped the band realize this vision, pushing the band through marathon late-night sessions.

“To us, it gives it a more natural feel,” Greer said. “For the listener, it doesn’t sound — if you’re playing right there together, the way we play onstage, you just have a much more natural feel to it. It gives it a little more live feel, a little more raw feel.”