1920s Music
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50 free 1920s Music trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The 1920s changed how music was made, sold and heard. Jazz spread from New Orleans to Chicago, New York and Paris, blues records found a mass audience, and radio carried dance bands into living rooms across America. This quiz collects fun facts about music in the 1920s: the bandleaders, singers and songwriters who defined the decade, the nightspots and dance crazes, the birth of commercial country music, the stage shows and early sound films, and the inventions that changed recording. The concert hall is here too, from Paris to Vienna. It suits anyone curious about the Jazz Age, from students and teachers planning a Roaring Twenties lesson to trivia hosts building a themed round. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you leave with a story as well as a score.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1927 Warner Bros. film starring Al Jolson is credited with ending the silent era with its synchronized songs?
The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer was mostly silent but had six numbers sung to the Vitaphone disc system, and its success pushed every studio toward sound.
Q 02Which gravel-voiced jazz trumpeter made wordless scat singing a sensation with the 1926 record 'Heebie Jeebies'?
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong is said to have dropped his lyric sheet during the take and improvised nonsense syllables, though scat was already heard around New Orleans.
Q 03Which 1920s dance craze was launched by a tune of the same name in the 1923 Broadway show Runnin' Wild?
The Charleston
The Charleston is named after the South Carolina harbor city, and the dance hit its peak of popularity from mid-1926 to 1927.
Q 04Which eerie-sounding electronic instrument, invented by a Russian physicist in 1920, is played without being touched?
The theremin
The theremin senses the player's hands as they move near two metal antennas, and its inventor patented it in the United States in 1928.
Q 05Cliff Edwards, a 1920s recording star known as 'Ukulele Ike', later voiced which Disney character in Pinocchio?
Jiminy Cricket
Jiminy Cricket became his most famous role, and in that 1940 film he introduced 'When You Wish Upon a Star'.
Q 06Which 1925 jazz standard by Ben Bernie and Maceo Pinkard later became the Harlem Globetrotters' theme tune?
Sweet Georgia Brown
Sweet Georgia Brown is heard at Globetrotters games in a whistled 1949 instrumental by Brother Bones and His Shadows.
Q 07Which song, tied forever to a 1952 Gene Kelly film, was first popularized in The Hollywood Revue of 1929?
Singin' in the Rain
Singin' in the Rain was performed in that early MGM talkie by Cliff Edwards and the Brox Sisters, 23 years before Kelly danced through his puddles.
Q 08Which Harlem nightspot of the Prohibition years starred Black performers but admitted almost only white customers?
The Cotton Club
The Cotton Club was run by bootlegger Owney Madden, who used it to sell his own beer to a wealthy downtown crowd.
Q 09Which American-born dancer became the toast of Paris in 1926 in a skirt of artificial bananas at the Folies Bergère?
Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker first wore the costume in the revue La Folie du jour, and it became a lasting symbol of the Jazz Age.
Q 10Which American writer further popularized the label 'the Jazz Age' with the title of a 1922 short-story collection?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald did not coin the phrase, which was in popular use before 1920, but his Tales of the Jazz Age spread it much further.
Q 11Which 1924 George Gershwin concert piece opens with a solo clarinet sliding upward in a famous wailing glissando?
Rhapsody in Blue
Rhapsody in Blue got its opening swoop by accident: a clarinetist stretched the notes at rehearsal as a joke on the composer, who liked it.
Q 12Which Washington-born bandleader got his aristocratic nickname in boyhood for his dapper dress and noble bearing?
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington won his big break in 1927, a house-band job at Harlem's most famous nightspot, only after King Oliver turned the booking down.
Q 13Which regal nickname did the national press give Bessie Smith, the highest-paid Black entertainer of her day?
Empress of the Blues
Q 21Which composer of 'Blue Skies' and 'Always' could not read sheet music and played piano almost entirely in F-sharp?
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin kept to the black keys and owned transposing pianos that changed key for him at the pull of a lever.
Q 22Which 1927 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein musical, with themes of racial prejudice, introduced 'Ol' Man River'?
Show Boat
Show Boat worried its producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, who feared that its serious tone would put audiences off.
Q 23Which song, a number one hit for Bobby Darin in 1959, was written for the 1928 German stage work The Threepenny Opera?
Mack the Knife
Mack the Knife was composed by Kurt Weill to words by Bertolt Brecht, as a street singer's ballad that opens and closes the drama.
Empress of the Blues was an upgrade on the title her label's publicists had given her, and she toured the country in her own custom-built railroad car.
Q 14Which Nashville radio show, begun on WSM in 1925, took its name from a joke about the classical program before it?
Grand Ole Opry
Grand Ole Opry was announcer George Hay's quip in 1927, made as an hour of network grand opera gave way to his barn dance.
Q 15Which soft vocal style of the late 1920s is epitomized by singers such as Rudy Vallée and the young Bing Crosby?
Crooning
Crooning became possible when improved microphones picked up quieter sounds, so vocalists no longer had to project to the back row of a theater.
Q 16Which nickname did New York's songwriting and sheet-music trade take from a stretch of West 28th Street in Manhattan?
Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley is said to have begun as an insult, likening the din of many cheap upright pianos playing different tunes to pans being banged.
Q 17What were the illicit Prohibition-era bars, lively venues for dance tunes and novelty numbers, commonly called?
Speakeasies
Speakeasies were often owned by organized criminals, and they largely disappeared once the national ban on alcohol ended in 1933.
Q 18Which former railroad worker, billed as 'The Singing Brakeman', is widely regarded as the Father of Country Music?
Jimmie Rodgers
Jimmie Rodgers was best known for his yodeling, and a second session held at his own insistence produced 'Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)'.
Q 19Which Canadian bandleader began a New Year's Eve radio tradition in 1929, closing each broadcast with 'Auld Lang Syne'?
Guy Lombardo
Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians played from the Roosevelt Hotel in New York in what was billed as radio's first nationwide New Year's Eve broadcast.
Q 20Which Tennessee border city hosted the 1927 recording sessions hailed as the 'Big Bang' of modern country music?
Bristol
Bristol hosted the sessions for twelve days on the third floor of a hat and glove company on State Street, the road that marks the state line.
Q 24Which 1928 Maurice Ravel piece is built over a single snare-drum rhythm that never changes from start to finish?
Boléro
Boléro became the composer's most famous work, much to his surprise: he had predicted that most orchestras would refuse to play it.
Q 25Which opera, home to the aria 'Nessun dorma', did Giacomo Puccini leave unfinished when he died in 1924?
Turandot
Turandot was completed from the composer's sketches by Franco Alfano and premiered in 1926, almost a year and a half after his death.
Q 26KDKA, which began by broadcasting the Harding–Cox election results in November 1920, is a radio station in which city?
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh is home to KDKA, considered by many historians the first commercially licensed radio station, a title that a rival, WWJ, has long disputed.
Q 27Which brittle material were most 78 rpm records of the 1920s pressed from, decades before vinyl took over?
Shellac
Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug on trees in India and Thailand, so the decade's hit discs were made with help from insects.
Q 28Which dance-band leader, whose orchestra hired a young Bing Crosby, was often hailed by the press as the 'King of Jazz'?
Paul Whiteman
Paul Whiteman led one of the most popular dance bands in America, and a rival bandleader later wrote that no one had carried the title with more dignity.
Q 29Which hit tune from the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette did Dmitri Shostakovich orchestrate in under an hour to win a bet?
Tea for Two
Tea for Two took him forty-five minutes, working from memory, and the arrangement is known as Tahiti Trot.
Q 30What name was given to the young women of the 1920s who bobbed their hair, wore knee-length skirts and listened to jazz?
Flappers
Flappers became icons of the decade's postwar turbulence and of the export of American jazz culture to Europe.