50 free Ella Fitzgerald trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Ella Fitzgerald trivia quiz covers the whole arc of the First Lady of Song, from a Virginia birth and a hard Yonkers adolescence to Amateur Night at the Apollo, the Chick Webb Orchestra at the Savoy, the nursery-rhyme hit that made her a star, and the Song Book albums that turned the Great American Songbook into serious listening. The easy questions cover the landmarks: where she was born, the band that discovered her, her signature hit and the trumpeter she recorded three albums with. The harder half is for people who own the box sets: the Yale dance audition, the university that gave her a Song Book partner who actually played on the record, the Copenhagen house, the Pan Am lawsuit, the Queens neighbourhood full of jazz royalty, the Memorex and KFC ads, the Smokey Robinson cover that was her last chart single, and where her cookbook collection ended up. Every answer was checked against Ella Fitzgerald's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our jazz, Louis Armstrong and Motown quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Ella Fitzgerald born in 1917?
Newport News, Virginia
The city later named a 276-seat theater after her, a few blocks from her Marshall Avenue birthplace.
Q 02Which nickname was Fitzgerald most often given?
The First Lady of Song
She was also called the Queen of Jazz and, more affectionately, Lady Ella.
Q 03In which New York city did Fitzgerald grow up after her family left Virginia?
Yonkers
A bronze statue of her by Vinnie Bagwell now stands outside the city's railroad station.
Q 04Fitzgerald's mother died in 1932 from injuries sustained in what?
A car accident
Ella was 15, and within a year had moved to Harlem to live with an aunt.
Q 05As a troubled teenager, Fitzgerald was sent to a state reformatory school in which New York town?
Hudson
A 2020 play, Ella The Ungovernable, imagined her escape from the New York Training School for Girls.
Q 06At which Harlem venue did a 17-year-old Fitzgerald make her debut on Amateur Night in November 1934?
The Apollo Theater
She won first prize but was never given the promised week of performances, apparently because of her dishevelled appearance.
Q 07What had Fitzgerald originally planned to do on stage at that Amateur Night before switching to singing?
Dance
A local dance act called the Edwards Sisters intimidated her out of it, and she sang "Judy" and "The Object of My Affection" instead.
Q 08Which singer did the young Fitzgerald idolise and try to sound exactly like?
Connee Boswell
Boswell was the lead singer of the Boswell Sisters, whose records Ella's mother brought home.
Q 09Which drummer and bandleader hired Fitzgerald for his orchestra in 1935?
Chick Webb
He was reluctant at first, calling the gawky teenager a diamond in the rough, until Bardu Ali talked him round.
Q 10Webb tested Fitzgerald with his band at a dance held at which university?
Yale
Decades later, in 1986, the same university gave her an honorary doctorate of music.
Q 11Fitzgerald and Webb's orchestra were most closely associated with which Harlem dance hall?
The Savoy Ballroom
Her first manager, Moe Gale, was one of the ballroom's co-founders.
Q 12Which 1938 nursery-rhyme adaptation, which she co-wrote, made Fitzgerald a national star?
"A-Tisket, A-Tasket"
It became one of the biggest-selling records of the entire decade.
Q 13Webb died in June 1939 of what illness?
Spinal tuberculosis
The band was renamed Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra, making the 22-year-old singer its leader.
Q 21Which composer was the only one to actually play on his own Song Book album with Fitzgerald?
Duke Ellington
He and Billy Strayhorn wrote two new pieces for the set, including a four-movement musical portrait of Ella.
Q 22Which film star lobbied the owner of Hollywood's Mocambo nightclub to book Fitzgerald in 1955?
Marilyn Monroe
The friendship was dramatised in Bonnie Greer's 2008 musical play Marilyn and Ella.
Q 23In 1961 Fitzgerald bought a house in the suburbs of which European capital?
Copenhagen
She had begun a relationship with a Danish man and briefly considered opening a jazz club there.
Q 14Roughly how many songs did Fitzgerald record with Webb's orchestra between 1935 and 1942?
150
She also ran a side project called Ella Fitzgerald and Her Savoy Eight in those years.
Q 15Whose bebop big band influenced Fitzgerald to make scat singing a major part of her repertoire?
Dizzy Gillespie
She said she was simply trying to do with her voice what she heard the horns in the band doing.
Q 16Which 1945 scat recording did The New York Times call one of the decade's most influential vocal jazz records?
"Flying Home"
The arrangement was by Vic Schoen; her 1947 bebop take on "Oh, Lady Be Good!" cemented the reputation.
Q 17Which producer became Fitzgerald's manager and created Verve Records around her?
Norman Granz
He also insisted on integrated seating and equal pay for her at every venue, cancelling shows when promoters refused.
Q 18Fitzgerald began working with her future manager after singing in which concert series he founded?
Jazz at the Philharmonic
The tours deliberately targeted segregated venues and demanded no coloured or white seating.
Q 19Which composer was the subject of the first Song Book album, released in 1956?
Cole Porter
Fitzgerald called the record a turning point that rescued her from a career of singing nothing but bop.
Q 20How many Song Book sets did Fitzgerald record for Verve between 1956 and 1964?
8
Frank Sinatra respected the series so much he barred Capitol from repackaging his own records composer by composer.
Q 24On Ella in Berlin she won a Grammy for a performance of which song, despite forgetting the words?
"Mack the Knife"
She improvised new lyrics on the spot, and the album remains one of her best sellers.
Q 25For how much was Verve Records sold to MGM in 1960?
$3 million
MGM let her contract lapse in 1967, and she drifted between Atlantic, Capitol and Reprise for five years.
Q 26Fitzgerald's last US chart single was a cover of which Smokey Robinson song?
"Get Ready"
The song had been a hit for the Temptations and would soon be a top-five hit for Rare Earth.
Q 27Which label did Granz found in 1972, on which Fitzgerald recorded some 20 albums?
Pablo Records
The surprise success of Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72 prompted him to start it, his first label since selling Verve.
Q 28Fitzgerald played the singer Maggie Jackson in which 1955 jazz film?
Pete Kelly's Blues
She considered the Warner Brothers role the biggest thing that had ever happened to her.
Q 29In which 1942 Abbott and Costello film did Fitzgerald sing two songs?
Ride 'Em Cowboy
It was her first movie work, thirteen years before her proper acting role.
Q 30In a famous Memorex commercial, what did a recording of Fitzgerald's voice do?
Shattered a glass
The tagline asked viewers: "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"