Blues Music Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Blues Music trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The blues grew up among African Americans in the Deep South in the decades after emancipation, carrying work-song call-and-response and African blue notes into juke joints, then onto "race records" in the 1920s, and finally into Chicago's electric clubs and London's R&B scene. Its twelve-bar form underpins jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll. These 50 questions cover the whole story: W. C. Handy's sheet music, Mamie Smith's first recording, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson's crossroads legend, boogie-woogie and jump blues, Chess Records and the Chicago sound, B.B. King's guitar Lucille, John Lee Hooker's boogie, the British blues boom and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Easy questions cover the nicknames and the biggest names; harder ones ask about the first slide recording, the Library of Congress sessions and who was recruited to Sun Records by Ike Turner. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a music-night round.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The blues originated among African Americans in which region of the United States?
The Deep South
The Deep South. Black Southerners who moved north for work carried the music with them, which is how a rural sound took root in cities like Chicago.
Q 02Which chord progression is the most common form of the blues?
Twelve-bar
Twelve-bar. In its basic form it needs just three chords, and the same pattern became the backbone of jazz, R&B and early rock and roll.
Q 03"Blue notes" are usually which scale degrees, flattened in pitch?
Thirds, fifths and sevenths
Thirds, fifths and sevenths. Singers and guitarists bend these notes slightly flat, often landing in the cracks between a piano's keys.
Q 04The word "blues" may derive from which old phrase for melancholy?
Blue devils
Blue devils. The same phrase was also used for delirium tremens, the visions that can come with severe alcohol withdrawal.
Q 05The three lines of a standard blues verse typically follow which lyric pattern?
AAB
AAB. A line is sung, repeated, then answered by a third, and an instrument fills the gap after each one, a call and response with roots in African music.
Q 06Which composer billed himself the "Father of the Blues"?
W. C. Handy
W. C. Handy. He did not invent the blues: he heard it from musicians in the Mississippi Delta, then arranged it for his band and became one of the first to publish it.
Q 07Which city did the "Father of the Blues" name in the title of his best-known song, published in 1914?
St. Louis
St. Louis. The tango was in fashion, so he opened "St. Louis Blues" with a tango rhythm to draw the dancers in before breaking into a low-down blues.
Q 08Who made the first blues recording by an African-American singer, "Crazy Blues", in 1920?
Mamie Smith
Mamie Smith. The record's runaway sales, many of them to Black buyers, showed labels a market they had ignored, and they hurried to record blues singers of their own.
Q 09Which singer was dubbed the "Mother of the Blues"?
Ma Rainey
Ma Rainey. By her own account she first heard the blues in a small Missouri town around 1902, and she was singing it in tent shows two decades before she made a record.
Q 10Which singer was nicknamed the "Empress of the Blues"?
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith. She became the highest-paid Black entertainer of her day and bought a custom railroad car for her troupe to travel and sleep in.
Q 11The "Empress of the Blues" was born in which Tennessee city?
Chattanooga
Chattanooga. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang and danced on its streets for change while her brother played guitar.
Q 12In the 1920s, the record industry sold blues by Black artists under which marketing category?
Race records
Race records. Billboard ran a Race Records chart until June 1949, when it renamed the listing rhythm and blues, the name that stuck.
Q 13Kentucky-born Sylvester Weaver made the first known recordings of which blues technique in 1923?
Slide guitar
Slide guitar. He pressed a knife along the strings, making the guitar whine and moan like a human voice.
Q 21Who is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues"?
Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters. He took his amplified Chicago sound to England in 1958, and British players such as Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies soon plugged in themselves.
Q 22On whose behalf did Alan Lomax first record the "father of modern Chicago blues" on a Mississippi plantation in 1941?
The Library of Congress
The Library of Congress. Lomax recorded him at home on the plantation where he drove a tractor and ran a juke joint out of his house; two years later he left for Chicago.
Q 23Which rock and roll pioneer got his record deal in 1955 on a tip from the "father of modern Chicago blues"?
Chuck Berry
Q 14Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller played which fingerpicked blues style of the southeastern states?
Piedmont blues
Piedmont blues. The thumb keeps a steady bass line going on the low strings while a finger picks a bouncy tune on top, so one guitar can sound like a ragtime piano.
Q 15Legend says which Mississippi bluesman, dead at 27, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads?
Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson. Older players such as Son House were unimpressed by him until he came back from months away playing brilliantly, and the legend grew up to explain it.
Q 16What was the title of Columbia's influential 1961 compilation of the crossroads bluesman's recordings?
King of the Delta Blues Singers
King of the Delta Blues Singers. He had only one modest hit in his lifetime, but this album made him a legend to the rock players of the 1960s.
Q 17Which 1930s urban blues style was built on a regular left-hand bass figure on piano?
Boogie-woogie
Boogie-woogie. It was played at rent parties and honky-tonks on Chicago's South Side in the 1920s, then became a national craze after a 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall.
Q 18Where did blues shouter Big Joe Turner, a pioneer of jump blues, start out as a singing bartender?
Kansas City
Kansas City. He sang from behind the bar as "The Singing Barman", and two decades later his "Shake, Rattle and Roll" helped launch rock and roll.
Q 19Which Texas-born "Stormy Monday" guitarist starred on the Los Angeles blues scene in the 1940s?
T-Bone Walker
T-Bone Walker. He was the first star of the electric blues guitar; B.B. King said that once he had heard him, he knew he had to have an electric guitar himself.
Q 20Which event marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues?
World War II
World War II. War work drew Southern players to crowded, noisy city clubs, where they switched to electric guitars simply to be heard.
Chuck Berry. He took the label a slow blues and his reworking of the country tune "Ida Red"; the second, retitled "Maybellene", became his first hit.
Q 24Most Chicago blues artists recorded for which Chicago label?
Chess Records
Chess Records. Leonard and Phil Chess arrived from Poland as boys in 1928 and ran South Side nightclubs, among them the Macomba Lounge, before they went into the record business.
Q 25Which British band recorded the instrumental "2120 South Michigan Avenue" at that Chicago studio address in 1964?
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones. They cut it on their first American tour, at the studio their blues heroes had used; "It's All Over Now", from the same sessions, became their first UK number one.
Q 26Which song was a number one R&B hit for blues singer Big Mama Thornton three years before Elvis Presley recorded it?
Hound Dog
Hound Dog. Two teenage songwriters, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, wrote it for her; it was her only hit, and she saw very little of the money it made.
Q 27Which bassist wrote "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Back Door Man" and "Wang Dang Doodle"?
Willie Dixon
Willie Dixon. Led Zeppelin borrowed his lyrics for "Whole Lotta Love" without credit; he sued, and the band settled and added his name to the song.
Q 28Blues musicians commonly call the harmonica what?
The harp
The harp. Tired of being drowned out by electric guitars, Little Walter cupped a small microphone against his and played it through an amplifier, making it a lead instrument.
Q 29Chester Arthur Burnett performed under which stage name?
Howlin' Wolf
Howlin' Wolf. The usual story is that his grandfather gave him the name, warning the boy that wolves would come and get him when he misbehaved.
Q 30Which 19-year-old bandleader's group really made "Rocket 88", the 1951 Memphis record often called the first rock and roll single?
Ike Turner
Ike Turner. The label credited the record to his sax player and singer, Jackie Brenston, and "his Delta Cats", who were really Turner's own band, the Kings of Rhythm.