This vibrant volume is a creative mix of contributions, including seminal essays and interpretive works, from researchers and writers in the area of popular music and major players in the bright future of symbolic interaction. Genres discussed range from country, jazz and the virtuoso to latino, grindcore and extreme metal.

List of Contributors. Introduction: The impact of popular music on symbolic interaction. Introduction: Music and identity. The group ethic in the improvising jazz ensemble: a symbolic interactionist analysis of music, identity, and social context. Established Latino music scenes: Sense of place and the challenge of authenticity. Authenticating identity work: Accounts of underground country musicians. Introduction: Spaces of musical interaction: Scenes, subcultures, and communities. Brutal belonging in Melbourne's grindcore scene. Musical genre as a gendered process: Authenticity in extreme metal. Digging a river downstream: Producing emergence in music. Teaching the art of playing with career-coupling relationships in the virtuoso world. Introduction: Music in (inter)action. Noise in action: the sonic (de)construction of art worlds. Driving to the beat of one's own hum: automobility and musical listening. Music, symbolic interaction, and study abroad. Grandmamma, what great ears you have! (Cross-generational musical interaction and the discovery of silence). Becoming “yellow”. Subculture and myth: the case of Robert Johnson in the 1920s–1930s US South. Leroy and me. Competing with her mother-in-law: the intersection of control management and emotion management in sport families. The futureless past. G. H. Mead's intimations of dialogue and narrative in social becoming with others. Studies in symbolic interaction. Studies in symbolic interaction. Copyright page.