Jazz, Blues & Folk Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which singer-songwriter of the 1960s protest scene, who called himself a singing journalist, wrote sharp topical songs such as I Ain't Marching Anymore and Draft Dodger Rag, and measured himself painfully against his friend and rival Bob Dylan?

Question 2

Which alto saxophonist and singer, leading a small group called the Tympany Five, dominated the Black music charts of the 1940s with witty, hard-shuffling numbers such as Caldonia and Choo Choo Ch'Boogie, in a style known as jump blues?

Question 3

Which English singer-songwriter and guitarist made three hushed, intricately fingerpicked albums, ending with the stark solo Pink Moon in 1972, that almost nobody bought while he was alive?

Question 4

Which song, first performed by Billie Holiday in 1939, set a poem by a New York schoolteacher, comparing lynched bodies to fruit hanging from southern trees, to a slow, spare musical setting?

Question 5

Which white New Orleans group, playing in New York, made what is generally recognised as the first jazz record, in 1917, and had the music's first hit, more than four years before any Black band was allowed into a studio to record the style?

Question 6

Which nineteen-hour public-television documentary series, broadcast in 2001, reached a huge audience and boosted back-catalogue sales but was attacked by critics for spending most of its length on the years before 1961 and largely dismissing the following four decades?

Question 7

Which trumpeter won Grammy awards in both jazz and classical music in the same year, became the founding artistic director of a major jazz programme at Lincoln Center, and argued forcefully that jazz had lost its way with fusion and the avant-garde?

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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.