Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Hank Williams trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Hank Williams was dead at 29 and had been a national star for barely four years, yet he wrote more country standards than almost anyone who came after him. This quiz covers the whole story: the boy called Hiram busking outside a Montgomery radio station, the Black street musician who taught him to keep time, the gas-station wedding, the Opry rejection and the Louisiana Hayride, and the Tin Pan Alley cover that finally made him a star. Then the songs themselves, from the doghouse comedy that helped invent rock and roll to the wooden Indian who never spoke up. The second half follows the fall: the fake doctor and his mail-order diploma, the firing from the Opry, the two public weddings, the snowstorm that put a teenager behind the wheel of the Cadillac, and the filling station in West Virginia. It finishes with what came after: the lawsuits over the estate, the daughter born five days too late, the biopics, the lost notebooks, and a son and grandson who built their own careers. Easy questions suit anyone who knows a few of the hits; the expert tier reaches WPA Blues, Herzog Studio and Sneezy Waters. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Williams, his songs, his family and his death, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you want the wider picture, our Grand Ole Opry and classic country pages sit alongside this one.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How old was Hank Williams when he died?
29
He had recorded 55 top-ten country singles in a career that lasted barely six years on a major label.
Q 02What was Hank Williams's real first name?
Hiram
His birth certificate, filled in when he was ten, misspelled it as "Hiriam"; he switched informally to Hank as a teenager in Montgomery.
Q 03In which US state was Hank Williams born and raised?
Alabama
He was born in the tiny community of Mount Olive in Butler County and grew up in a string of small southern towns.
Q 04On what date did Hank Williams die?
January 1, 1953
He was found dead in the back seat of his car during an overnight drive through West Virginia.
Q 05What was the name of Hank Williams's backing band?
The Drifting Cowboys
He formed the first version in Montgomery in the late 1930s and his mother served as its manager and booking agent.
Q 06Which 1949 number one, a cover of a 1922 Tin Pan Alley song, propelled Hank Williams to Opry stardom?
Lovesick Blues
Cliff Friend and Irving Mills wrote it for a 1922 musical; Williams's version was the biggest hit of his career and later entered the National Recording Registry.
Q 07Which record label released Hank Williams's music from 1947 until his death?
MGM Records
The label was the newly formed recording arm of the Loews movie corporation, which is why a film deal came bundled with his stardom.
Q 08Which producer discovered Williams during a ping-pong game at WSM and oversaw every session of his career?
Fred Rose
He agreed to hear Williams sing during his daily ping-pong game at the WSM studios and signed him to a six-song deal on the spot.
Q 09Which crooner's 1951 'Cold, Cold Heart' spent 27 weeks on the charts and reached number one?
Tony Bennett
Williams phoned the singer to ask, as a joke, why he had ruined the song; in truth he played the pop version on jukeboxes whenever he could.
Q 10Which English actor played Hank Williams in the 2015 biopic "I Saw the Light"?
Tom Hiddleston
Elizabeth Olsen played his first wife, and the script was based on Colin Escott's biography.
Q 11Who starred as Hank Williams in the 1964 MGM biopic "Your Cheatin' Heart"?
George Hamilton
He lip-synched the songs and had been a fan since boyhood, though the studio initially could not picture its preppy playboy as a honky-tonk crooner.
Q 12Which song about a wooden Indian statue was Williams's posthumous number one for 14 weeks?
Kaw-Liga
It was the A-side to "Your Cheatin' Heart" and, unusually for a Williams record, opens in a minor key and features a drummer.
Q 13Which Shreveport radio barn dance on KWKH did Hank Williams join in 1948 after the Opry turned him down?
Louisiana Hayride
Q 21Which singer, born five days after Hank's death, spent decades proving she was his daughter?
Jett Williams
She was adopted twice, learned the truth only in her twenties, and was recognised as an heir to the estate after a state supreme court ruling.
Q 22Williams was born with which spinal defect, the source of lifelong pain?
Spina bifida occulta
A fall while squirrel hunting in 1951 made it worse and led to a spinal fusion that he cut short by checking out on Christmas Eve.
Q 23What was Williams's first MGM hit, a 1947 comic number about a man banished to the doghouse?
Move It On Over
He returned to the same show after the Opry fired him in 1952; a few years later it launched Elvis Presley.
Q 14Why was Hank Williams dismissed from the Grand Ole Opry in August 1952?
Habitual drunkenness and missed shows
He went back to Shreveport and the show that had first made him a regional star, and married again two months later.
Q 15What was the last single released in Hank Williams's lifetime, a title that turned grimly prophetic?
I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive
It was written as a comic number; Chet Atkins recalled Williams was so weak at the session that he sank into a chair after every take.
Q 16Who was the street musician who gave the young Williams the only musical training he ever acknowledged?
Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne
He was paid in meals cooked by Hank's mother and stressed rhythm and showmanship; Williams later recorded a song he had taught him, "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It".
Q 17Under what pseudonym did Williams record his moralising recitations so jukebox customers would not get a sermon?
Luke the Drifter
The identity was an open secret, and he often performed the recitations on stage anyway; they used only voice, organ, bass fiddle and steel guitar.
Q 18Where did Williams and Audrey Sheppard get married in December 1944?
At a Texaco gas station
A justice of the peace did the honours in Andalusia; the marriage was technically invalid because her divorce had not cleared its waiting period.
Q 19What nickname did Hank give his son Randall, later famous as Hank Williams Jr.?
Bocephus
It came from a ventriloquist's dummy used by Grand Ole Opry comedian Rod Brasfield.
Q 20Whom did Williams marry in October 1952, having met her at the Opry when she was dating Faron Young?
Billie Jean Jones
After his death a judge ruled the marriage invalid because her own divorce was not final until 11 days after the wedding.
Its twelve-bar structure and ascending riff are so close to "Rock Around the Clock" that it is often called one of the first rock and roll records.
Q 24For which performer did Hank Williams claim to write 'Hey, Good Lookin'' before keeping it as 'too good'?
Jimmy Dickens
Minnie Pearl and her husband were on the same flight; the title was borrowed from a Cole Porter show tune.
Q 25Which patent medicine sponsored the 1951 caravan tour on which Williams shared the bill with Bob Hope?
Hadacol
The tonic's Cajun promoters also gave him the bus ride on which he started writing "Jambalaya" while listening to them talk about food.
Q 26On which programme did Williams make his first television appearance, in November 1951?
The Perry Como Show
He sang "Hey, Good Lookin'", and the following week the host opened his own show in a cowboy hat singing the same song with an apology.
Q 27Which country legend told young Williams he had 'a million-dollar voice, son, but a ten-cent brain'?
Roy Acuff
He later co-founded the publishing house that signed Williams and sang at his funeral.
Q 28Williams's melody for "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" was based on which Cajun song?
Grand Texas
The original is about a lost love who ran off to Texas; Williams kept only the tune and swapped in a party of crawfish pie and filé gumbo.
Q 29How did Williams compose "Your Cheatin' Heart", according to the accepted account?
Dictated it to his fiancée while driving
He was driving from Nashville to Shreveport, described his first wife with the phrase, then had his passenger grab his notebook.
Q 30What inspired the title of "I Saw the Light", written in January 1947?
His mother spotting airport lights near Montgomery
He was asleep drunk in the back seat when she woke him to say they were nearly home; the tune borrows from Albert E. Brumley's "He Set Me Free".