Abstract: This study explores country music in a diversity of urban and suburban participatory contexts within the extended Los Angeles area through examination of three different musical affinity groups. These nontraditional country music participants, urban honky-tonk patrons, participants in Ronnie Mack's Barn Dance, and members of the queer country music community, structure individual and communal identities through diverse acts of participation within the country music world, but exist outside traditional southern, rural, working-class communities from which country music arose initially. Drawing upon approaches from ethnomusicology, post-modern anthropology, sociology, and cultural geography the dissertation considers each specific context as an individual frame (see Goffman 1974) within which issues of authenticity, identity, shame, and resistance are confronted and negotiated relative to various community and individual relationships employing country music as the structuring metaphor. The dissertation is structured in two parts. The first investigates country music and behavior in Los Angeles' largely straight, mainstream country music community while the second explores issues within the queer country music community both historically and contemporarily. Each section is organized similarly in three chapters that provide historical background, a discussion of the contemporary community, and a third chapter providing ethnographic detail in a set of scenes, vignettes, and performer profiles. In both sections of the dissertation, however, the issues confronted are similar. The study illustrates various processes through which one musical tradition has been adapted and manipulated to serve the needs of many communities. Through examination of the musical lives of individuals within these communities, the dissertation explores ways that music functions as a vehicle for the structuring and performance of identity and for the working-out and trying-on of multiple possibilities for individual and group identities. It examines the ways that affiliation within country music culture provides a site for resistance to the hegemony of heteronormative culture for queer country participants and serves as an 'in your face' appropriation of a previously sacrosanct musical symbol. It deconstructs ways in which country music provides a quotidian context for political contestation and resistance and a marginal space within which individuals can place themselves in order to engage in a critical response to domination.