Louis Armstrong Trivia
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58 free Louis Armstrong trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Louis Armstrong trivia quiz covers the trumpeter and singer who turned jazz from a group music into a soloist's art. The easy questions cover the nickname, the city, the instrument, the two most famous songs and the record that knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts. From there it moves through the life: the Karnoffsky family and the pawn-shop cornet, the New Year's Eve gunshot that sent him to the Colored Waif's Home, the riverboats with Fate Marable, King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, the Hot Five and Hot Seven, the dropped sheet music that produced the first famous scat record, and the four wives. The harder end covers the 200 high Cs, the mob-connected manager Joe Glaser, the year without playing, the Little Rock outburst that got him an FBI file, the razor blade and the lip salve, the laxative he handed to royalty, 'Ambassador Satch', the Time cover as King of the Zulus, and the record on the Voyager Golden Record. Every answer was checked against Armstrong's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our jazz and famous musicians quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Louis Armstrong born and raised?
New Orleans
New Orleans: he grew up in a neighbourhood so rough it was called the Battlefield, and the city later renamed its international airport after him.
Q 02What birthday did Armstrong himself often claim, though records suggest August 4, 1901?
July 4, 1900
July 4, 1900: he believed it all his life, but a church record found in the 1980s put his birth at August 4, 1901, so his museum now celebrates both days.
Q 03Which Jewish immigrant family employed the young Armstrong and helped him buy his first cornet?
The Karnoffskys
The Karnoffskys: they fed him at their table and encouraged his singing, and some sixty years later he wrote a memoir about the family from a hospital bed.
Q 04What New Year's Eve stunt got the young Armstrong sent to the Colored Waif's Home?
Fired a gun into the air
Fired a gun into the air: the pistol was his stepfather's, and the home he was sent to gave him his first proper teacher, Peter Davis, who made him leader of its band.
Q 05Where did Fate Marable's band play when it taught the young Armstrong to read written arrangements?
Mississippi riverboats
Mississippi riverboats: it was the first band he had joined that played from written arrangements, so the teenager had to sharpen his reading fast to keep his seat.
Q 06Whose place did Armstrong take in Kid Ory's band when his mentor, nicknamed 'King', moved north?
Joe Oliver's
Joe Oliver's: 'King' Oliver had taken the teenager under his wing, and a few years later he sent for Armstrong to play second cornet in his own band.
Q 07To which city did Armstrong move in 1922 to join his mentor's Creole Jazz Band?
Chicago
Chicago: there he and the bandleader became the talk of the town with their two-cornet breaks, and within a year he was making his first records.
Q 08For which film series did Armstrong record 'We Have All the Time in the World' in 1969?
James Bond
James Bond: the song from On Her Majesty's Secret Service flopped as a single, then reached No. 3 in Britain in 1994 after a Guinness advert revived it.
Q 09Why was Armstrong placed far behind the band at his first recording session in 1923?
He played too loudly
He played too loudly: the band blew straight into a recording horn, and Armstrong recalled being so much stronger than the leader that he had to stand at the door.
Q 10Which Creole Jazz Band pianist became Armstrong's second wife in 1924?
Lil Hardin
Lil Hardin: she pushed him to quit his mentor's band and try to make it on his own, and his first records as a leader followed the next year.
Q 11Whose orchestra, New York's top African-American dance band, did Armstrong join in 1924?
Fletcher Henderson's
Fletcher Henderson's: the year proved unsatisfying, so he left and began making records under his own name for the first time.
Q 12Armstrong played trumpet on 'Blue Yodel No. 9', a 1930 record by Jimmie Rodgers, an early star of which genre?
Country
Country: forty years after that session, in the last year of his life, Armstrong re-created the record on television as a duet with Johnny Cash.
Q 13What was 'Muggles', the title of a 1920s Armstrong recording, slang for?
Marijuana
Marijuana: the slang apparently began in his home town, and Armstrong smoked it for most of his working life and was once arrested for possessing it.
Q 21In which 1954 biopic, starring James Stewart as a bandleader, does Armstrong appear as himself?
The Glenn Miller Story
The Glenn Miller Story: Armstrong and drummer Gene Krupa join its 'Basin Street Blues' jam, while Stewart's trombone was dubbed by professionals, one of them his own coach.
Q 22Armstrong's Secret Nine, a team he sponsored on a triumphant visit home in 1931, played which sport?
Baseball
Baseball: during that hero's return he bought the local team new uniforms and threw out the first pitch himself.
Q 23Which mob-connected manager cleaned up Armstrong's legal and money mess from the mid-1930s?
Joe Glaser
Q 14Armstrong's Hot Five made jazz history while existing almost entirely in which setting?
The recording studio
The recording studio: a record label asked him to assemble the group, and as the Hot Five it appeared in public only at a couple of shows that label staged.
Q 15On which 1926 Hot Five recording did Armstrong famously scat, supposedly after dropping the sheet music?
'Heebie Jeebies'
'Heebie Jeebies': he said the lyric sheet slipped from his hands and the label boss waved him to keep going, and the record became a hit that put scat singing on the map.
Q 16With which pianist did Armstrong record the 1928 duet 'Weather Bird' and the landmark 'West End Blues'?
Earl 'Fatha' Hines
Earl 'Fatha' Hines: his 'trumpet style' meant melody lines struck hard enough to cut through a band, and generations of later pianists took it as their model.
Q 17Which two musicians were added to the Hot Five to make it the Hot Seven in 1927?
A drummer and a tuba player
A drummer and a tuba player: acoustic recording horns coped badly with drums and bass, which is why the Hot Five had gone without them until Baby Dodds and Pete Briggs joined.
Q 18Which Fats Waller song did Armstrong perform in the 1929 Broadway revue Hot Chocolates?
'Ain't Misbehavin''
'Ain't Misbehavin'': he had been hired for the orchestra pit, but his nightly feature went down so well that he was brought up on stage to perform it.
Q 19Which Hoagy Carmichael standard, first recorded as a 1927 instrumental, did Armstrong sing in 1931?
'Stardust'
'Stardust': rather than sing the tune straight he paraphrased it like a trumpet solo, and records like this one helped make popular songs the repertoire of big-band jazz.
Q 20Which crooner, Armstrong's co-star in 1936's Pennies from Heaven, admired and copied his singing?
Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby: he used his clout as the film's star to insist that the studio hire Armstrong, though its boss had no wish to pay for him.
Joe Glaser: within months he had Armstrong fronting a new big band and recording for Decca, and the two stayed together until Glaser's death 34 years later.
Q 24In 1937 Armstrong became the first African American to do what on network radio?
Host a sponsored national broadcast
Host a sponsored national broadcast: he took over Rudy Vallee's yeast-sponsored variety show for the summer, and episodes survive among the tapes he kept at home.
Q 25In which New York borough did Armstrong settle for good in 1943 with his wife Lucille?
Queens
Queens: Lucille put a down payment on the modest house without telling him, and he liked the street so much that he never moved again; it is now his museum.
Q 26What was the small group that Armstrong led from 1947 for the rest of his career called?
The All-Stars
The All-Stars: big bands had become too costly to tour, so he went back to the small-group jazz of his youth, and the sextet stayed his working band until he died.
Q 27At the 1950 session that produced his 'La Vie en rose', Armstrong also recorded which French song?
'C'est si bon'
'C'est si bon': he had heard Suzy Delair sing it at a festival jam session in Nice two years earlier and, the story goes, promised to record it back home.
Q 28Which news magazine put Armstrong on its cover in 1949, as he prepared to reign as King of the Zulus?
Time
Time: its reporter was with him when he heard he would be King of the Zulus, and printed his reaction, that he had dreamed of it all his life.
Q 29In 1960, the two sides in which country's civil conflict called a truce when Armstrong came to play?
The Congo
The Congo: he was carried into the stadium on a chair, and ten years later he was still telling television audiences how he had stopped a war.
Q 30Which 1964 record ended the Beatles' 14-week hold on No. 1 and made the 62-year-old Armstrong a chart-topper?
'Hello, Dolly!'
'Hello, Dolly!': it was cut as a publisher's demo to plug a show that had not yet opened, and his label had no idea what it had until the orders snowed it under.