Irving Berlin Trivia
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50 free Irving Berlin trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Irving Berlin wrote an estimated 1,500 songs in a career that ran from ragtime to the Kennedy era, and this quiz covers the whole of it: the immigrant boy from the Russian Empire who sang for pennies on the Bowery, the singing waiter who published his first song for 33 cents, the composer who could only play in F-sharp, and the man behind White Christmas, God Bless America, Easter Parade, Cheek to Cheek and There's No Business Like Show Business. Easy questions ask which holiday standard he wrote and who first sang it; harder ones dig into the transposing piano, the Broadway theatre he built, the heiress he eloped with, the Oscar he presented to himself and the royalties he gave to the Scouts. The questions are about the songs and their stories, not the lyrics, so it is a fair round for musical-theatre fans, Great American Songbook listeners and anyone who has watched Holiday Inn or Top Hat. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Berlin, his songs, shows and films, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Irving Berlin was born in 1888 in which country?
Russia
Russia. Official papers gave his birthplace as a city now in Belarus, but Berlin learned late in life that he was probably born in Tyumen, Siberia.
Q 02What was Irving Berlin's birth name?
Israel Beilin
Israel Beilin, also spelled Baline. The cover of his first published song in 1907 credited the words to "I. Berlin", and he kept the name for the rest of his life.
Q 03What drove Berlin's family from Europe to New York in 1893?
Anti-Jewish pogroms
Anti-Jewish pogroms. The family landed at Ellis Island when he was five, and Berlin later said he never felt poor as a boy, because he had known no other life.
Q 04What was Berlin's father's profession in the old country?
Cantor
Cantor. His father's chanting in synagogue was the only musical schooling Berlin ever had: he never took a formal lesson, and taught himself the piano.
Q 05About how much did Berlin earn from his first published song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", in 1907?
37 cents
37 cents is the usual figure (one history says 33): Berlin wrote only the words, so a 75-cent royalty was split with the cafe pianist who composed the tune.
Q 06What job did the teenage Berlin hold at the Pelham Cafe in New York's Chinatown?
Singing waiter
Singing waiter. Between serving drinks he sang the day's hits with his own made-up words, and after closing time he stayed behind to pick out tunes on the cafe piano.
Q 07In which single musical key could Berlin play the piano?
F-sharp
F-sharp. To hear a tune in any other key he worked a lever on a specially built transposing piano, which he called his "Buick" and took along on trips to Europe.
Q 08Berlin composed by ear, so who wrote his tunes down?
A musical secretary
A musical secretary. Berlin worked each song out in his head, then sang or played it to a transcriber, who played it back until he was satisfied.
Q 09Which 1911 song made Irving Berlin an international star?
Alexander's Ragtime Band
Alexander's Ragtime Band sold a million copies of sheet music within months, although, for all its title, the tune is a march and not a rag at all.
Q 10Which husband-and-wife dance team starred in Berlin's 1914 revue Watch Your Step?
Vernon and Irene Castle
Vernon and Irene Castle were the ballroom idols of the ragtime dance craze, and Berlin's first complete Broadway score was built to show them off.
Q 11What tragedy lay behind Berlin's first ballad, "When I Lost You", in 1912?
His bride died of typhoid
His bride died of typhoid, caught on their honeymoon in Havana. After months of silence Berlin turned his grief into the song, which sold more than a million copies.
Q 12Which Berlin song from the 1919 Ziegfeld Follies became the revue's lasting theme?
A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody
A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody outlived the Follies: when Hollywood filmed the showman's life in 1936, the tune was staged on a towering spiral staircase nicknamed the "wedding cake".
Q 13What was the name of the all-soldier revue Berlin wrote at Camp Upton in 1918?
Q 21What wedding present did Berlin give his second wife when her father reportedly disowned her?
The rights to the song "Always"
The rights to the song "Always" gave her an income of her own whatever happened. The tables turned in the Depression, when it was Berlin who bailed out his ruined father-in-law.
Q 22Berlin's "Blue Skies" is sung in which early talkie?
The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer, the hit that hurried Hollywood from silent films to sound. Al Jolson's character chats with his mother, then plays her the song at the piano, until his father walks in and shouts "Stop!"
Q 23Which country singer took Berlin's 1920s song "Blue Skies" to the top of the country chart in 1978?
Yip Yip Yaphank
Yip Yip Yaphank, named for the Long Island town where the camp stood, was staged to raise money for a soldiers' service centre, and after a tryout at the camp it played Broadway.
Q 14Which song did Berlin sing in both army revues?
Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning
Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning was a night owl's protest: used to composing until dawn, the newly drafted Berlin said reveille was what he liked least about army life.
Q 15Which famous song did Berlin write for his 1918 soldier revue but file away for twenty years?
God Bless America
God Bless America was dropped from the 1918 show and lay in his files until 1938, when, with war looming in Europe, Berlin revised the words and brought it out at last.
Q 16Which singer introduced Berlin's patriotic anthem in 1938 and made it her signature song?
Kate Smith
Kate Smith sang it first on her Armistice Day radio show. Three decades later her recording became the good-luck charm of hockey's Philadelphia Flyers, played before their biggest games.
Q 17To whom did Berlin assign all royalties from his patriotic anthem of 1938?
The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts
The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Uneasy about profiting from a hymn to his adopted country, Berlin signed the copyright over to a fund in 1940, and it has paid the Scouts millions since.
Q 18Which folk singer wrote This Land Is Your Land in 1940 as a response to Berlin's anthem?
Woody Guthrie
His song was originally titled "God Blessed America for Me".
Q 19Which Broadway house did Berlin build with producer Sam Harris in 1921?
The Music Box
The Music Box was built to stage Berlin's own revues, and he kept his share in it for life: even in his last years he would phone the theatre's managers to check the receipts.
Q 20Which heiress did Berlin marry in 1926 over her father's fierce objections?
Ellin Mackay
Ellin Mackay's father, head of a telegraph empire, shipped her off to Europe to forget the songwriter. She came home and married him in a quiet civil ceremony, and they stayed together for more than six decades.
Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson cut it for an album of old pop standards. Berlin had written the tune as a late extra for the star of someone else's Broadway show, which closed within weeks while the song lived on.
Q 24Which synth-pop artist took Puttin' on the Ritz to number 4 in the US in 1983, when Berlin was 95?
Taco
Taco, a Dutch singer, recorded it in 1982 with a tap-dancing break and snatches of other Berlin tunes; it was a hit across Europe before American radio picked it up the following year.
Q 25Which Berlin holiday standard reused the tune of his 1917 song "Smile and Show Your Dimple"?
Easter Parade
Easter Parade. The 1917 tune was meant to cheer a girl whose sweetheart had gone to war; in 1933 Berlin gave it new words for a Fifth Avenue scene in a Broadway revue.
Q 26In As Thousands Cheer (1933), each number was presented as what?
An item in a newspaper
An item in a newspaper. Each scene began with a headline, from celebrity scandals to European war debts, and the weather report turned into the song "Heat Wave".
Q 27Which comedy team starred in Berlin's 1929 film musical The Cocoanuts?
The Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers. George S. Kaufman had written the stage show for them in 1925, and the four brothers simply repeated their roles for one of the first all-talking film musicals.
Q 28Berlin wrote "Cheek to Cheek" specifically for which film star?
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire danced it in Top Hat with Ginger Rogers, whose gown shed feathers all over the set. For all its fame, the song lost the Best Song Oscar to "Lullaby of Broadway".
Q 29Which 1942 film introduced White Christmas?
Holiday Inn
Holiday Inn. Berlin expected the film's Valentine's Day number to be the hit and promoted that first, but the public made the Christmas song a runaway instead.
Q 30Whose recording of White Christmas is regarded as the best-selling single of all time?
Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby's record has sold some 50 million copies. It took off in 1942, speaking to troops spending their first winter far from home, and Berlin called it a peace song.