George Gershwin Trivia
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48 free George Gershwin trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
George Gershwin left school at 15 to plug songs on Tin Pan Alley for $15 a week, and by 25 he had written Rhapsody in Blue in five weeks for a concert he had initially turned down. He wanted lessons from Ravel and Nadia Boulanger and was refused by both, on the grounds that classical training would ruin what made him Gershwin. He played tennis with Schoenberg, spent a summer on a South Carolina island writing an opera, and died of a brain tumor at 38 while scoring a Hollywood musical. These 48 questions follow that arc: the Brooklyn childhood and the piano bought for Ira, Swanee and Al Jolson, the Aeolian Hall premiere and the clarinet wail that began as a joke, the Broadway shows with Ira, An American in Paris and its taxi horns, Porgy and Bess from Boston try-out to the Houston Grand Opera revival and the 1959 film, and the final months in Beverly Hills. Easy questions cover the famous works; the expert tier asks about pseudonyms, piano rolls and the neurosurgeon fetched by Coast Guard cutter. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation. Play solo or print it for a music night.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which song was the hit of Gershwin's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess?
Summertime
Summertime. It was the first number Gershwin finished for the opera, a lullaby Clara sings to her baby in the opening scene, and Billie Holiday took it into the pop charts in 1936.
Q 02Rhapsody in Blue blends classical music with effects drawn from which genre?
Jazz
Jazz. The story goes that Gershwin learned from a newspaper that a bandleader had billed him to write a jazz concerto, and dashed the piece off in a few weeks.
Q 03Which singer's 1959 Gershwin songbook made Ira say he never knew how good the songs were?
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald. Ira helped choose the songs for the set and retouched some of his lyrics for her, and her 'But Not for Me' from it won a Grammy.
Q 04From which country did Gershwin's parents emigrate to New York?
Russia
Russia. The family name had been Gershovitz before it was Americanized in New York, and the future George Gershwin was registered at birth as Jacob.
Q 05In which New York borough was Gershwin born?
Brooklyn
Brooklyn. He was born in East New York, and music came later: when the family bought a second-hand piano for his brother Ira, it was George who took it over.
Q 06Which hit musical opened in 2003 at the Broadway theatre named for George and Ira Gershwin?
Wicked
Wicked. The house opened in 1972 as the Uris and took the Gershwin name in the middle of the 1983 Tony Awards, which it was hosting; it is the largest theatre on Broadway.
Q 07Which Broadway star made Gershwin's 'Swanee' a hit by adding it to his show Sinbad?
Al Jolson
Al Jolson. His record sold in the millions, another million copies went in sheet music, and Gershwin became a celebrity overnight.
Q 08Which unusual instruments did Gershwin bring back from France for An American in Paris?
Taxi horns
Taxi horns. He brought four home for the premiere, and the letters A to D he circled in the score were probably labels for the horns, not notes, so orchestras may have honked the wrong pitches for decades.
Q 09In which city is the opera Porgy and Bess set?
Charleston
Charleston. Porgy rides a goat cart because his real-life model did: Samuel Smalls, a disabled man known around the city as Goat Cart Sam.
Q 10Which US airline adopted Rhapsody in Blue as its advertising theme?
United
United Airlines. The fee it paid for the tune, put at $500,000, was even cited in a 2003 Supreme Court dissent as a cost of long copyrights that ends up in ticket prices.
Q 11What caused Gershwin's death in July 1937?
A brain tumor
A brain tumor. Doctors missed it for months and suspected it only after he fell into a coma; surgeons operated at once, but he died that morning, aged 38.
Q 12Which Woody Allen film has a soundtrack made entirely of Gershwin compositions?
Manhattan
Manhattan. Its opening, the New York skyline in black and white set to Rhapsody in Blue, introduced the piece to a new generation of listeners.
Q 13What job did 15-year-old Gershwin take on Tin Pan Alley after leaving school?
Song plugger
Song plugger. For three years he pounded out a publisher's new tunes on the piano so that customers would buy the sheet music, a grind one biographer called 'plugger's purgatory'.
Q 21Before reaching Broadway, Porgy and Bess had its first performance, a 1935 tryout, in which city?
Boston
Boston. The tryout at the Colonial Theatre ran so long that Gershwin cut a good many numbers before the Broadway opening ten days later.
Q 22Which Porgy and Bess song has lyrics by Ira Gershwin alone?
It Ain't Necessarily So
It Ain't Necessarily So. The novelist wrote or shared most of the opera's lyrics, but this one is all Ira's: a drug dealer's mock sermon at a picnic, scoffing at Bible stories.
Q 23In which New York venue did An American in Paris premiere in December 1928?
Carnegie Hall
Q 14Which instrument plays the famous opening glissando of Rhapsody in Blue?
Clarinet
Clarinet. Gershwin wrote a plain run of notes; the band's clarinetist Ross Gorman bent it into a siren-like slide while playing around in rehearsal, and Gershwin told him to keep it.
Q 15Which Gershwin song turns on rival pronunciations of tomato and potato?
Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
Let's Call the Whole Thing Off. It was first performed on screen in 1937 as a tap duet on roller skates around a Central Park rink.
Q 16Which dancer starred in the 1951 film musical An American in Paris, built on Gershwin's music?
Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly. He choreographed the film as well, ending it with a long wordless ballet danced to the tone poem, and it won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Q 17Who orchestrated the original 1924 scoring of Rhapsody in Blue?
Ferde Grofé
Ferde Grofé. Racing a deadline, Gershwin sketched the piece at the piano and handed the scoring to the band's arranger; his own solo part wasn't written down, so he played it from memory at the premiere.
Q 18Which bandleader commissioned Rhapsody in Blue?
Paul Whiteman
Paul Whiteman. He conducted the 1924 premiere with Gershwin at the piano, and the piece went over so well that he took it as his band's theme tune.
Q 19Which Gershwin show was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama?
Of Thee I Sing
Of Thee I Sing. The 1932 prize named the book writers and lyricist Ira but not the composer; the Pulitzer board made amends in 1998, George's centennial, with a posthumous special citation.
Q 20Porgy and Bess was adapted from a 1925 novel by which author?
DuBose Heyward
DuBose Heyward. Gershwin wrote to him in 1926 proposing an opera, but other work kept the composer away until 1934; by then Heyward and his wife Dorothy had already put the novel on stage as a play.
Carnegie Hall. Walter Damrosch programmed it beside Wagner and César Franck, and for once the composer had nothing to play: it was his first orchestral piece with no piano part.
Q 24Which work did Walter Damrosch commission after Rhapsody in Blue?
Concerto in F
Concerto in F. An arranger had scored the Rhapsody for him, but Gershwin was determined to do his own orchestration this time, and he played the solo part at the 1925 premiere.
Q 25Which famed Paris composition teacher declined to take Gershwin as a pupil, saying there was nothing to teach him?
Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger. She feared that strict classical study would spoil the style he already had; Gershwin took her refusal as a compliment and told the story for years.
Q 26Which future film star sang 'Embraceable You' in the 1930 musical that introduced it?
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers. It was her first Broadway lead, at 19, but the show's sensation was another newcomer, Ethel Merman, who stopped it cold with 'I Got Rhythm'.
Q 27Gershwin gave 'Strike Up the Band' to which university as a football fight song?
UCLA
UCLA. The brothers had just moved to Beverly Hills for film work in 1936 when they made the school a gift of the tune, with Ira reworking his words as 'Strike Up the Band for UCLA'.
Q 28Gershwin's only Oscar nomination was for a song from which 1937 film?
Shall We Dance
Shall We Dance. The nominated song, 'They Can't Take That Away from Me', lost to 'Sweet Leilani', and the nomination came after his death that July, two months after the film opened.
Q 29Who was the first recipient of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize in 2007?
Paul Simon
Paul Simon. In the same announcement the Library added his album Graceland to its National Recording Registry, then honoured him with a televised concert gala in Washington.
Q 30Which Stephen Foster song gave Gershwin's 'Swanee' its river?
Old Folks at Home
Old Folks at Home. Foster never saw the Suwannee and is said to have picked it because the two-syllable 'Swanee' fitted his tune; Gershwin's hit borrows the river and even quotes the old folks at home.