Ella Fitzgerald Trivia
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49 free Ella Fitzgerald trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Ella Fitzgerald born in 1917?
Newport News, Virginia
Newport News, Virginia, was home only briefly: her parents separated and her mother took her north to New York while she was still a small child.
Q 02Which nickname was Fitzgerald most often given?
The First Lady of Song
The First Lady of Song was honoured in kind: when the Society of Singers created its top career award, it named the prize the Ella and made her its first recipient.
Q 03In which New York city did Ella Fitzgerald grow up?
Yonkers
Yonkers became home when her mother moved north with Joseph da Silva, a Portuguese immigrant, and Ella excelled at school there until her mother's death upended her teens.
Q 04After her mother died in 1932, the teenage Ella Fitzgerald went to live with which relative in Harlem?
An aunt
An aunt, her mother's sister, took her in, but the once model pupil began skipping school; years later the same aunt raised Ella's adopted son while she toured.
Q 05At which Harlem venue did Fitzgerald make her stage debut on Amateur Night in November 1934?
The Apollo Theater
The Apollo Theater's famously tough crowd booed and laughed when she walked on, then called for encores, and she left with the first prize.
Q 06What had Ella Fitzgerald planned to do at her 1934 amateur-night debut before deciding to sing instead?
Dance
Dance was the plan, but the Edwards Sisters, a dance act, closed the main show just before the amateurs, and she lost her nerve and sang instead.
Q 07Which singer did the young Fitzgerald idolise and try to sound exactly like?
Connee Boswell
Connee Boswell led the Boswell Sisters; Ella's mother brought one of her records home, and Ella copied her so closely that she won her first talent contest singing in Boswell's style.
Q 08Fitzgerald shared a two-week Broadway concert run in the 1970s with Count Basie and which singer?
Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra shared the Uris Theater bill with her and Basie; in 1990 he sang with her one last time on the night he accepted the Society of Singers award that carries her name.
Q 09Chick Webb gave the teenage Fitzgerald a trial with his band at which university?
Yale
Yale was the test: Webb, who already had a male singer, said that if the college kids liked her, she would stay. They did, and he hired her.
Q 10Fitzgerald and Chick Webb's orchestra were most closely tied to which Harlem ballroom?
The Savoy Ballroom
The Savoy Ballroom made Webb's orchestra its house band, and in the hall's battles of the bands the group regularly beat bigger-name visitors.
Q 11Which 1938 nursery-rhyme adaptation, which she co-wrote, made Fitzgerald a national star?
"A-Tisket, A-Tasket"
"A-Tisket, A-Tasket" was her own idea: she pressed arranger Van Alexander to build a song on the rhyme, a drop-the-handkerchief game from her childhood, then changed some of his words.
Q 12Webb 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 13Chick Webb's orchestra, with Fitzgerald as its singer, won a famous 1937 battle of the bands against whose band?
Benny Goodman
Q 21Which film star lobbied the owner of Hollywood's Mocambo nightclub to book Fitzgerald in 1955?
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe, Ella recalled, phoned the owner and promised to take a front table every night if he booked her; afterwards, Ella said, she never had to play a small jazz club again.
Q 22Which crooner said that, "man, woman or child", Ella Fitzgerald was the greatest singer of all?
Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby was returning a compliment: his were among the records she grew up listening to, and she later sang as a guest on his television show.
Q 23On the live album Ella in Berlin, Fitzgerald won a Grammy for which song despite forgetting the words?
"Mack the Knife"
Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, brought his band uptown at the height of its fame and was beaten; two years later Webb died and the 22-year-old Ella took over as leader of the orchestra.
Q 14Whose bebop big band influenced Fitzgerald to make scat singing a major part of her repertoire?
Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy Gillespie took her on tour with his big band in 1946, and she said she simply tried to do with her voice what she heard the horns in the band doing.
Q 15Which 1945 scat recording did The New York Times call one of the decade's most influential vocal jazz records?
"Flying Home"
"Flying Home" was Lionel Hampton's signature tune; she remade it as a showcase for scat, and her bebop take on "Oh, Lady Be Good!" two years later sealed her name as an improviser.
Q 16Which producer became Fitzgerald's manager and created Verve Records around her?
Norman Granz
Norman Granz's stand against segregated shows made enemies: Texas police once raided her dressing room over a backstage dice game, arrested her, then asked for her autograph.
Q 17Fitzgerald began working with her future manager after singing in which concert series he founded?
Jazz at the Philharmonic
Jazz at the Philharmonic toured under a rule of no "white" or "colored" seating, and its founder cancelled bookings rather than play to a segregated house.
Q 18Which composer was the subject of Fitzgerald's first Song Book album, released in 1956?
Cole Porter
Cole Porter came first, and she feared the idea meant her manager wanted her out of show business; she later called the album a turning point in her life.
Q 19Which lyricist was the subject of Fitzgerald's last Verve Song Book?
Johnny Mercer
Johnny Mercer closed the series in 1964, eight years after it began; by then the Song Books had carried her voice far beyond the jazz audience she started with.
Q 20Which composer's Song Book album with Fitzgerald includes a four-movement musical portrait of her?
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington and his orchestra also play on the set, the only Song Book whose composer joined her; the album won her a Grammy at the very first ceremony.
"Mack the Knife" was new to her act that night in 1960; when the words deserted her she made up fresh ones, name-checking Bobby Darin, whose version had just been a No. 1 hit.
Q 24Which songwriter said, "I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them"?
Ira Gershwin
Ira Gershwin helped choose the songs for her 1959 Gershwin set and revised some of his lyrics for it; The New York Times called the five-LP collection the artistic peak of her Song Books.
Q 25Fitzgerald's last US chart single was a cover of which Smokey Robinson song?
"Get Ready"
"Get Ready" had been a Temptations hit; her 1969 cover came in a spell of singing Beatles, Bacharach and Motown songs that never suited her, and she soon returned to jazz full time.
Q 26Which label did Fitzgerald's manager found in 1973, returning her to jazz full time?
Pablo Records
Pablo Records was her manager's first label since he sold Verve more than a decade earlier, and he built it around the artists he managed; for Ella it meant a return to straight jazz.
Q 27Fitzgerald played the singer Maggie Jackson in which 1955 jazz film?
Pete Kelly's Blues
Pete Kelly's Blues was panned by The New York Times, whose critic still singled out "the wonderful Ella Fitzgerald" for filling the screen in her few scenes.
Q 28Fitzgerald made her screen debut in 1942 singing in a comedy starring which duo?
Abbott and Costello
Abbott and Costello's Ride 'Em Cowboy was her film debut, a fact The New York Times had to correct after its obituary named a 1955 picture as her first.
Q 29In a famous Memorex commercial, what did a recording of Fitzgerald's voice do?
Shattered a glass
Shattered a glass: her live note broke one, then the tape of it, played back, broke another, which set up the tagline "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"
Q 30For which fast-food chain did Fitzgerald sing and scat the slogan "We do chicken right!"?
KFC
KFC got the line from an agency it had hired to reach Black audiences, then used it across the whole chain through the 1980s, with Ella scatting it in a run of television ads.