Bob Dylan Trivia
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98 free Bob Dylan trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
39 free Bob Dylan trivia questions with answers. Bob Dylan trivia can go in several directions at once, and this quiz takes most of them. The 98 questions start with the biography — the birth name, the iron-mining town, the trip to a New Jersey hospital to meet Woody Guthrie — and move through the records that changed popular music. There are questions on the songs themselves: where the melody of 'Blowin' in the Wind' came from, why radio refused to play a six-minute single, whose improvised organ part Dylan pushed to the front of the mix, and which album closes with eleven acoustic minutes. Later rounds cover the motorcycle crash, the basement recordings, the gospel years, the Traveling Wilburys and the 2016 Nobel Prize. Every answer was checked against a primary reference before publication, so the chart positions, dates and album details are accurate rather than approximate. Difficulty runs from questions any radio listener will get to a few that require a serious record collection.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What name was Bob Dylan given at birth?
Robert Allen Zimmerman
Robert Allen Zimmerman made the new name legal only in August 1962, five months after his first album had come out under the name Bob Dylan.
Q 02Which already-famous folk singer championed the young Bob Dylan in 1963 by bringing him on stage at her concerts?
Joan Baez
Joan Baez recorded his songs and brought the newcomer out at her own shows; the two were also a couple for about two years.
Q 03In which iron-mining town did Bob Dylan spend most of his childhood?
Hibbing
Hibbing was his mother's home town: the family moved there when he was six, after his father caught polio and they wanted relatives close by.
Q 04Which musician did Bob Dylan travel to New York to visit in January 1961?
Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie was in a New Jersey hospital with Huntington's disease when the 19-year-old came to see him; Dylan put a tribute, Song to Woody, on his first album.
Q 05From which traditional song did Bob Dylan partly take the melody of Blowin' in the Wind?
No More Auction Block
No More Auction Block is an old song from the days of slavery. Dylan was singing it in clubs in 1962, and his live recording of it finally came out in 1991.
Q 06Which soul star answered Blowin' in the Wind?
Sam Cooke
Sam Cooke admired the song but felt a Black writer should have written it, so he sang it on stage and then wrote A Change Is Gonna Come.
Q 07Whose cover of Blowin' in the Wind became a huge hit weeks after Bob Dylan released his own version?
Peter, Paul and Mary
Peter, Paul and Mary released it three weeks after Dylan's album came out; the trio shared his manager, which is how the new song reached them so fast.
Q 08At which festival did Bob Dylan first 'go electric' in July 1965, playing a loud rock set?
The Newport Folk Festival
The Newport Folk Festival crowd met him with boos and cheers. He left after three songs, then came back alone to sing It's All Over Now, Baby Blue on an acoustic guitar.
Q 09How high did Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone climb on the US Billboard chart in 1965?
Number two
Number two was its peak, in September 1965: the Beatles' Help! held the top spot and kept Dylan from the summit.
Q 10Why were many US radio stations at first unwilling to play Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone?
It was over six minutes long
It was over six minutes long, so promo copies split the song across two sides of the disc, until listeners' demand pushed stations to play it whole.
Q 11Which guitarist's 1968 cover of All Along the Watchtower so impressed Bob Dylan that he adopted its arrangement on stage?
Jimi Hendrix
Jimi Hendrix turned the quiet acoustic track into a rock classic, and Dylan has played it his way ever since; it became the song he has performed live more than any other.
Q 12Where did Rolling Stone magazine rank Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone on its 2004 and 2010 greatest songs lists?
Number one
Number one on both lists: the magazine said that with this single Dylan had transformed what a popular song could contain and attempt.
Q 13Which 1965 Bob Dylan album opens with Like a Rolling Stone?
Highway 61 Revisited
Q 21Which step did Bob Dylan take in the late 1970s that reshaped his next three albums?
He became a born-again Christian
He became a born-again Christian, spending months in Bible classes at a Vineyard church in California before he recorded a note of the new songs.
Q 22Which guitarist played lead on Bob Dylan's 1979 album Slow Train Coming?
Mark Knopfler
Mark Knopfler got the call after Dylan watched his group, Dire Straits, play a Los Angeles club in 1979 and was impressed enough to hire him.
Q 23Which song won Dylan a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance?
Gotta Serve Somebody
Highway 61 Revisited is named after the road that ran from the town where he was born down to Memphis and New Orleans, the country of the blues he loved.
Q 14Which eleven-minute acoustic song closes Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited?
Desolation Row
Desolation Row is the record's one track without electric backing. The delicate second guitar was improvised by Charlie McCoy, a Nashville session player who happened to be visiting New York.
Q 15Which disaster does Bob Dylan retell across 45 verses in the title track of his 2012 album Tempest?
The sinking of the Titanic
The sinking of the Titanic. Dylan built the song on an old Carter Family tune, mixed fact with fiction, and even gave Leonardo DiCaprio a place in the lyric.
Q 16What happened to Bob Dylan on 29 July 1966?
He crashed his motorcycle
He crashed his motorcycle, then spent months recovering out of public view, and he did not go back on tour until 1974.
Q 17Which presidential candidate quoted Bob Dylan in his 1976 speech accepting his party's nomination?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter told the Democratic convention that America was, in Bob Dylan's phrase, busy being born, not busy dying; the line comes from It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding).
Q 18In which religion was Bob Dylan raised in small-town Minnesota?
Judaism
Judaism. He had his bar mitzvah in 1954, and from the 1980s he grew close to the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, later appearing on its telethons.
Q 19What was the nickname of the house near Woodstock where Bob Dylan and the Hawks recorded in 1967?
Big Pink
Big Pink was a house in West Saugerties shared by three of the Hawks. When the group made a debut album of its own in 1968, it was titled Music from Big Pink.
Q 20Which album did Bob Dylan record in September 1974, filling it with songs about broken relationships?
Blood on the Tracks
Blood on the Tracks was finished in New York, but weeks before its release Dylan recut several songs in Minneapolis at sessions his brother set up.
It opens his first gospel album. Two more Christian records followed in 1980 and 1981.
Q 24Which supergroup did Bob Dylan join in 1988?
The Traveling Wilburys
The Traveling Wilburys began by accident: George Harrison needed a B-side in a hurry, friends gathered at Dylan's California studio, and the result was judged too good to throw away.
Q 25Which 1975 Bob Dylan song did he often say took 'ten years to live and two years to write'?
Tangled Up in Blue
Tangled Up in Blue jumps about in time and between points of view, a method Dylan credited to classes with the painter Norman Raeben.
Q 26Which member of Bob Dylan's 1988 supergroup died that December, weeks after its first album came out?
Roy Orbison
Roy Orbison died of a heart attack in the middle of a comeback. The other four chose not to replace him and made their second album as a quartet.
Q 27Whom did Bob Dylan quietly marry in November 1965, at the height of his fame?
Sara Lownds
Sara Lownds was a former model. The marriage ended in divorce in 1977, a year after he put a song called simply Sara on the album Desire.
Q 28Which Bob Dylan song, a parent's blessing for a child, appears in two versions on the same 1974 album?
Forever Young
Forever Young was written as a lullaby for his eldest son, Jesse. Wary of sounding too sentimental, Dylan cut it twice, once gently and once as a rocker.
Q 29For what was Bob Dylan awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature?
For creating new poetic expressions in song
For creating new poetic expressions in song, within what the citation called the great American song tradition. Dylan then said nothing in public about the prize for days.
Q 30Which prize gave Bob Dylan a special citation in 2008?
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize board cited his profound impact on popular music and American culture, and lyrics it described as having extraordinary poetic power.