Bluegrass Trivia
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47 free Bluegrass trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Bluegrass is barely 80 years old and has a birth certificate: a 1946 line-up of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys with Lester Flatt on guitar and a young Earl Scruggs playing banjo with three fingers instead of two. Monroe, the youngest of eight, got stuck with the mandolin because his brothers already had the fiddle and guitar. Elvis's first B-side was a Monroe waltz. Flatt and Scruggs hit number one with a sitcom theme, split over Bob Dylan songs, and did not speak for a decade. These 47 questions run from the Appalachian roots and the Opry audition to the first festival in 1965, Jerry Garcia tagging along with Monroe, newgrass and the Flecktones, Alison Krauss's 27 Grammys, a Belgian film, and World Bluegrass Day. Easy questions cover the instruments and the famous names; the expert tier asks about Monroe's early bands, his fiddlers and bassists, and who actually sang the Jed Clampett theme. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation. Play it solo, or print it for a festival car-park jam.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which film made the bluegrass instrumental 'Dueling Banjos' a hit?
Deliverance
Deliverance. The film credited the tune to its performers, so its composer Arthur Smith, who had written it in the 1950s as 'Feudin' Banjos', sued Warner Bros. and won his name back.
Q 02Which Osborne Brothers bluegrass hit became an official state song of Tennessee?
Rocky Top
Rocky Top. Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the couple behind the Everly Brothers' 'Bye Bye Love', wrote it in 1967, and the University of Tennessee's band has played it at games since the 1970s.
Q 03Which instrument was Bill Monroe's trademark?
Mandolin
Mandolin. His older brothers had already claimed the instruments they wanted, so the youngest of eight took what was left, then turned it into a lead instrument.
Q 04Earl Scruggs popularised a three-finger picking style on which instrument?
Banjo
Banjo. In country bands it had mostly been a comedian's prop; Scruggs's rapid three-finger rolls made it a lead voice and caused a sensation when he joined Bill Monroe's band in 1945.
Q 05In which region of the United States did bluegrass develop in the 1940s?
Appalachia
Appalachia. Its mountain string bands had long mixed the ballads and dance tunes of British and Irish settlers with African American blues, the blend Bill Monroe sped up into bluegrass.
Q 06Bill Monroe named his band for the bluegrass of which state, his home?
Kentucky
Kentucky, the Bluegrass State. He called his band the Blue Grass Boys in its honour, and the band's name later passed to the whole style of music.
Q 07Which Flatt and Scruggs instrumental was used throughout the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde?
Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Foggy Mountain Breakdown. The 1949 recording backs the film's getaway scenes, which made the old tune popular all over again and won Flatt and Scruggs a Grammy.
Q 08Flatt and Scruggs hit number one with the theme to which TV sitcom?
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Beverly Hillbillies. 'The Ballad of Jed Clampett' was the duo's only country number one, and they turned up on the show themselves, playing old friends of the Clampetts.
Q 09Which of these instruments is a standard part of a traditional bluegrass band?
Upright bass
Upright bass. Traditional bluegrass is all acoustic strings with no drummer, and bands that later added drums, piano or electric instruments were given a label of their own: 'newgrass'.
Q 10Which word completes the phrase long used for Bill Monroe's piercing singing, the 'high ___ sound'?
Lonesome
Lonesome. The phrase stuck to Monroe after a 1966 compilation of his early Decca singles was titled The High, Lonesome Sound.
Q 11Which star covered Bill Monroe's most famous song as the B-side of his first Sun Records single?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley. In July 1954 his trio took Monroe's slow waltz and sped it into a bluesy rocker, an early rockabilly record, for the flip side of 'That's All Right'.
Q 12Alison Krauss has long fronted which bluegrass band?
Union Station
Union Station. Krauss joined as a teenager when songwriter John Pennell led it, and by the first album they made together, in 1989, the band was hers.
Q 13Bill Monroe auditioned in 1939 for a regular spot on which radio show?
Grand Ole Opry
Q 21Bill Monroe invited which future country star on stage as a small boy?
Ricky Skaggs
Ricky Skaggs. He had been playing for less than a year; he was soon a guest on Flatt and Scruggs's television show, and in his teens he was hired into Ralph Stanley's band.
Q 22Béla Fleck, later leader of the Flecktones, spent most of the 1980s in which bluegrass band?
New Grass Revival
New Grass Revival. Led by Sam Bush, its long-haired players folded rock, jazz and reggae into bluegrass, and some traditionalists shunned them for it.
Q 23Which country superstar won the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy for her 1999 album The Grass Is Blue?
Dolly Parton
Grand Ole Opry. A breakneck 'Mule Skinner Blues' won over the show's founder, George D. Hay, and Monroe stayed a member until his death in 1996.
Q 14Which instrument did Lester Flatt play in Bill Monroe's band?
Guitar
Guitar. Flatt's solid rhythm playing set the timing for bluegrass, and his warm lead singing anchored the band's defining records of the late 1940s.
Q 15Which old song becomes a radio hit for George Clooney's band in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Man of Constant Sorrow
Man of Constant Sorrow. Clooney only mimed it: the lead voice belongs to bluegrass singer Dan Tyminski, whose recording went on to win a Grammy and a CMA award.
Q 16Bill Monroe founded an annual bluegrass festival in 1967 at Bean Blossom, in which state?
Indiana
Indiana. Monroe had bought the country music park at Bean Blossom back in 1951, and the festival he launched there became one of the longest-running in bluegrass.
Q 17Which future Grateful Dead guitarist drove across the country in 1964 to follow Bill Monroe's shows?
Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia. He and bandmate Sandy Rothman taped Monroe's concerts but never got up the nerve to ask for a job in his band; Rothman later toured with it, while Garcia went electric.
Q 18Which older style did Earl Scruggs's three-finger picking largely displace?
Clawhammer
Clawhammer. The player strikes down on the strings with the back of a fingernail; once Scruggs's rolls took over, it survived on stage through a few holdouts such as Grandpa Jones.
Q 19Bill Monroe's song 'Uncle Pen' honours an uncle who played which instrument at dances?
Fiddle
Fiddle. Pen Vandiver took in his orphaned teenage nephew, and the pair earned much-needed money playing for local dances, an apprenticeship Monroe later set to music.
Q 20Lester Flatt balked at singing songs by which writer, a factor in his 1969 split from Earl Scruggs?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan. Their label pushed folk-rock material on the duo; Scruggs, keen to play modern music with his sons, welcomed it, while Flatt left to lead a traditional band.
Dolly Parton. With country radio cooling on her, she went back to the mountain music of her childhood, and bluegrass's own trade association named the result its Album of the Year.
Q 24Alison Krauss made the platinum album Raising Sand with which English rock singer?
Robert Plant
Robert Plant. Producer T Bone Burnett chose mostly obscure songs for the Led Zeppelin singer and Krauss, and their 2007 album went on to win Album of the Year.
Q 25'Dobro' is another name for which instrument often heard in bluegrass?
Resonator guitar
Resonator guitar. Josh Graves brought it into bluegrass in 1955: Flatt and Scruggs had hired him as a bassist and comedian, then quickly moved him to the Dobro full-time.
Q 26In a standard bluegrass harmony 'stack', which voice sits on top?
Tenor
Tenor. The lead carries the melody in the middle with the baritone beneath it, and because Bill Monroe sang the top part himself, a piercing tenor became the mark of the style.
Q 27Which 2012 Belgian film put Flemish bluegrass musicians at the centre of its story?
The Broken Circle Breakdown
The Broken Circle Breakdown. Its actors performed all the band's music themselves, then took the songs on a concert tour as the soundtrack album sold well.
Q 28Earl Scruggs won a Grammy for a 2001 remake of his signature tune featuring which comedian?
Steve Martin
Steve Martin. A serious picker since his teens, he joined Scruggs on the all-star remake and later won another Grammy for a bluegrass album of his own.
Q 29Which California country-rock group made a landmark 1972 album with Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff and Mother Maybelle Carter?
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Earl Scruggs helped persuade Nashville's old guard to record with the young Californians, and the album became a bridge between two generations of country music.
Q 30Carlton Haney staged the first weekend-long bluegrass festival in 1965 on a horse farm near which Virginia city?
Roanoke
Roanoke. Over Labor Day weekend Haney gathered Bill Monroe and other leading bands at Cantrell's Horse Farm in nearby Fincastle, and the multi-day format he tried there became the standard for bluegrass festivals.