Classic Country Trivia
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100 free Classic Country trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This classic country trivia quiz covers the music from the 1927 Bristol sessions through the outlaw era of the 1970s: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Buck Owens and the Bakersfield sound, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Conway Twitty, Glen Campbell, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, plus the Grand Ole Opry and the Ryman. Expect questions on the yodelling brakeman, the first woman to top the country chart, the plane crash that killed Patsy Cline, the pardon Merle Haggard received from Governor Reagan, the map that named Conway Twitty, the seat Waylon gave up on Buddy Holly's plane and the song that revived George Jones in 1980. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone raised on the classics, a third need a closer memory of the hits and the labels, and the rest reward the fans who know the details of the biographies. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the artists and institutions before publishing, and each question carries the sentence that establishes it. If you think one is wrong, use the report button and we will look again.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which nickname is Jimmie Rodgers best known by?
The Father of Country Music
The Father of Country Music spent years as a railroad brakeman. Tuberculosis, diagnosed in 1924, pushed him off the trains and into performing full time.
Q 02In which Tennessee city did the Carter Family make their first recordings in August 1927?
Bristol
Bristol drew dozens of hopefuls to talent scout Ralph Peer's sessions in the summer of 1927. They launched both the Carters and Jimmie Rodgers, which is why they are called country music's Big Bang.
Q 03Which member of the original Carter Family sang harmony and played lead guitar?
Maybelle
Maybelle picked the melody on the bass strings with her thumb while her fingers brushed the rhythm, a style that helped turn the guitar from a rhythm instrument into a lead one.
Q 04With which songwriter did Roy Acuff co-found Nashville's first major country publishing company in 1942?
Fred Rose
Fred Rose supplied the publishing know-how. When the firm signed Hank Williams in 1946, he became the young singer's song editor and record producer.
Q 05Ernest Tubb's 1941 hit "Walking the Floor Over You" marked the rise of which country style?
Honky-tonk
Honky-tonk became his sound by accident. Tubb began as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator, but a 1939 tonsillectomy lowered his voice and ended his yodelling, so he wrote new songs to fit.
Q 06Which 1952 Kitty Wells hit was the first country number one by a solo woman?
It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels
It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels answered a Hank Thompson hit by blaming unfaithful men. Wells, close to quitting music, cut it mainly for the $125 session fee.
Q 07Which Alabama street musician, known as 'Tee-Tot', gave the young Hank Williams guitar lessons?
Rufus Payne
Rufus Payne played the blues on Alabama street corners, and the boy followed him around town. The blues phrasing and rhythm he passed on ran through Hank's singing for the rest of his life.
Q 08What was the name of Hank Williams's backing band?
The Drifting Cowboys
The Drifting Cowboys began around 1938, when the teenage Hank was singing on Montgomery radio. He spent the war years working in Mobile's shipyards, then came home and rebuilt the band.
Q 09In the back seat of which make of car did Hank Williams die on New Year's Day 1953?
Cadillac
A Cadillac, his baby-blue 1952 model, was carrying him from Montgomery to a show in Canton, Ohio. He was 29, and the car is now preserved as a centrepiece of the Hank Williams Museum.
Q 10Which cover of a 1920s show tune became Hank Williams's first number one on the country chart?
Lovesick Blues
Lovesick Blues, a pop tune from 1922, held the top spot for 16 weeks in 1949. Its success persuaded the Grand Ole Opry to hire him despite doubts about his reliability.
Q 11What was the name of the backing band that gave Johnny Cash his train-like chugging rhythm?
The Tennessee Three
The Tennessee Three began as the Tennessee Two: Luther Perkins on guitar and Marshall Grant on bass, both car mechanics. The name changed in 1960, when drummer W. S. Holland joined.
Q 12At which Memphis studio did Johnny Cash audition for Sam Phillips in the mid-1950s?
Sun
Sun signed him in 1955, and the appliance salesman born J. R. Cash took the name Johnny there. His first single had 'Hey Porter' on one side.
Q 13In which Arkansas farming colony did Johnny Cash grow up picking cotton?
Dyess
Dyess, a New Deal colony, gave struggling families land they might one day own. Cash, born in Kingsland, arrived at three; his boyhood home there is now open for tours.
Q 21Loretta Lynn was born in which Kentucky community, immortalised in "Coal Miner's Daughter"?
Butcher Hollow
Butcher Hollow was the only world she knew until she married at 15, a month after meeting Doolittle Lynn. The couple soon left the mountains for a logging town in Washington state.
Q 22Which actress played Loretta Lynn in the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter?
Sissy Spacek
Sissy Spacek was picked by Lynn herself from a photograph, before Lynn had seen any of her films. She did her own singing in the part and won the Oscar for Best Actress.
Q 23Which prison held the young Merle Haggard until his parole in 1960?
San Quentin
San Quentin took him after a botched roadhouse burglary and a failed jail break. Caught drunk on prison home brew, he landed in solitary, then won parole in 1960 and turned to music.
Q 14Which song became Patsy Cline's first major hit when she sang it on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts?
Walkin' After Midnight
Walkin' After Midnight reached No. 2 on the country chart and No. 12 on the pop chart after that 1957 broadcast. Then the hits dried up: she waited four years for another.
Q 15Which producer shaped Patsy Cline's Nashville sound after she moved to Decca Records in 1960?
Owen Bradley
Owen Bradley set her voice against smooth arrangements and the Jordanaires' backing vocals. Cline fought the polished sound at first, but it turned her into a crossover star.
Q 16Which two fellow country stars died alongside Patsy Cline in the March 1963 plane crash?
Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins
Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins had shared the bill with her at a Kansas City benefit for a late disc jockey's family. Her manager, Randy Hughes, was piloting them home to Nashville.
Q 17Which signature 1959 Marty Robbins song won the Grammy for Best Country and Western Recording?
El Paso
El Paso ran more than four and a half minutes, far longer than radio singles of the day. Disc jockeys played it anyway, and it began 1960 at number one on both the country and pop charts.
Q 18Which 1982 Clint Eastwood film gave Marty Robbins his last screen role and a final top-ten hit, its title song?
Honkytonk Man
Honkytonk Man took its name from Clancy Carlile's 1980 novel. Robbins sang the title song and played a studio musician, then died of a heart attack a week before the film opened.
Q 19Buck Owens and the Buckaroos pioneered which twangy electric sound, named for their home city?
Bakersfield
Bakersfield was where Dust Bowl migrants had settled, and its bar bands played loud and electric. Owens cut his records with his own road band, shunning Nashville's string-sweetened studio polish.
Q 20Which Buck Owens number one did the Beatles cover with Ringo Starr singing lead?
Act Naturally
Act Naturally was Owens's first chart-topper, in 1963. Decades later he and Ringo Starr recorded it again, this time as a duet.
Q 24Which California governor granted Merle Haggard a full pardon in 1972?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan wiped the ex-convict's record clean once he had become a country star. That same year astronaut Charles Duke carried a tape of Haggard performing aboard Apollo 16.
Q 25Which 1969 Merle Haggard number one took aim at hippies and draft-card burners?
Okie from Muskogee
Okie from Muskogee topped the country chart for four weeks. Haggard gave shifting accounts of how seriously he meant it, at times calling it a spoof and at others a patriotic song.
Q 26Which sparse 1975 Willie Nelson concept album did Columbia reluctantly release?
Red Headed Stranger
Red Headed Stranger sounded so bare that Columbia executives took it for a demo. Nelson's contract gave him creative control, so it came out untouched and produced his first number one single.
Q 27Whose band did Willie Nelson join as a bassist after moving to Nashville in 1960?
Ray Price
Ray Price co-owned Pamper Music, the publisher that had just signed Nelson as a songwriter, and the bass job in his band, the Cherokee Cowboys, came with the deal. Roger Miller passed through the same band.
Q 28What was country music's first platinum album, released in 1976?
Wanted! The Outlaws
Wanted! The Outlaws was a repackaging job: RCA gathered mostly older tracks by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser to cash in on a trend. It sold a million.
Q 29Whose band was Waylon Jennings playing bass in when he gave up his seat on the plane that crashed in 1959?
Buddy Holly's
Buddy Holly's parting joke was that he hoped the tour bus would freeze up, and Jennings shot back that he hoped the plane would crash. The exchange haunted him for decades.
Q 30Which song written by the Big Bopper gave George Jones his first number one in 1959?
White Lightning
White Lightning reached number one that April. Its writer never saw it happen: J. P. Richardson, the Big Bopper, had died in a plane crash two months earlier.