Jazz, Blues & Folk Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the style that was the popular dance music of America from roughly 1935 to 1945, played by large orchestras for ballrooms full of jitterbugging couples, with Benny Goodman crowned its king?

Question 2

Which 1958 recording by the Kingston Trio, a smooth collegiate arrangement of an 1866 North Carolina murder ballad, sold around three million copies and is usually credited with igniting the commercial folk boom?

Question 3

Which small, wedge-shaped basement club in Greenwich Village, open since 1935, is the most storied room in jazz, the site of dozens of famous live albums by artists including John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins?

Question 4

Which long-necked-banjo player and song-leader, a member of the Weavers, was blacklisted and charged with contempt of Congress in the 1950s for refusing to answer questions about his politics, and later wrote or popularised If I Had a Hammer and Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Question 5

Which body of field recordings, made for the Library of Congress from the 1930s onward by a travelling father-and-son team, preserved the voices of prisoners, sharecroppers and street musicians across the American South and beyond?

Question 6

Which quartet, including Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, had major pop hits around 1950 with Goodnight Irene and Tzena Tzena Tzena, then saw its career wrecked when its members were blacklisted over alleged communist ties?

Question 7

Which controversy followed a jazz trumpeter's decision, around 1969 and 1970, to record with electric instruments, rock rhythms and studio editing, producing a double album that sold in huge numbers but was denounced by purists as a sell-out?

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About Jazz, Blues & Folk

Jazz, blues and folk are the three great streams of American vernacular music, tangled together at the root and feeding almost everything that came after, and this quiz covers them in eighty questions. Each describes a player, a bandleader, a singer, a style, an instrument's role, a famous song, a term or an event, and asks you to name it from four options, then explains what it is along with a record, a story or a dispute attached to it.

The first pack is the bedrock: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane; Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald; swing and bebop; the blues itself and Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and B. B. King; Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the folk revival and Joan Baez; and the ideas of improvisation and ragtime.

The second pack widens the field. More jazz names, from Monk, Brubeck, Mingus and Ornette Coleman through Herbie Hancock and Wynton Marsalis to Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, Django Reinhardt, Stan Getz, Chet Baker and Louis Jordan. The blues of Bessie Smith, Lead Belly, John Lee Hooker and Howlin' Wolf, the Delta and Chicago styles, the twelve-bar form, boogie-woogie and the harmonica. The folk of the Lomax family, the Weavers, Peter Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs, the Child Ballads, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and skiffle. And the shared furniture: the Great American Songbook, the jazz standard, scat, Blue Note Records, the rhythm section and the Newport Jazz Festival.

The third pack is history and legend: Buddy Bolden; the crossroads bargain; Strange Fruit; the closing of Storyville; the first jazz record by the Original Dixieland Jass Band; the 1942 recording ban; the disputed story of Bessie Smith's death; The House of the Rising Sun; Ellington's 1956 Newport comeback; free jazz and the Bitches Brew backlash; the Lomax recordings; Tom Dooley and the folk boom; Ken Burns's documentary; the 1960s blues rediscovery tours; We Shall Overcome; the Village Vanguard; Jelly Roll Morton; smooth jazz and Kenny G; and the Cotton Club.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, a player beside players, a style beside styles, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Where a picture appears it is a plain instrument or a page of music, never a portrait or an album cover, and each has been checked against its own four options. Facts and dates have been checked, and several myths, from the segregated-hospital story to Storyville single-handedly moving jazz north, are set in context.