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50 free Southern trivia questions with answers. This Southern trivia quiz roams the whole American South, from the Mason-Dixon line down to the Delta and the Lowcountry. It covers the food (grits, sweet tea, boiled peanuts, pimento cheese, barbecue sauces and the drugstore where Coca-Cola was first poured), the culture (y'all, Waffle House, Cracker Barrel, the Grand Ole Opry, Dollywood, SEC football and NASCAR's moonshine roots) and the history, from Jamestown and the first Confederate capital to Montgomery, Selma and Little Rock. There are questions on famous Southerners too - Elvis, Dolly, Oprah, Muhammad Ali, Jimmy Carter - and on the writers who defined the region: Faulkner, Harper Lee and Flannery O'Connor. Roughly a third of the questions are easy warm-ups for a game night; the rest climb toward the kind of detail only a lifelong Southerner (or a very well-read Yankee) will know. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two English surveyors gave the famous line separating Pennsylvania from Maryland its name?
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon
The pair spent four years (1763-1767) laying out the boundary; the line only became shorthand for North versus South decades later, during the Missouri Compromise debates.
Q 02Which city was the largest in the American South by population in the 2020 census?
Houston
The South has been the fastest-growing region of the country, and Houston has ridden that growth to become its biggest city.
Q 03Which writer claimed credit for inventing the term 'Bible Belt'?
H. L. Mencken
The famously acerbic Baltimore journalist used it in a 1924 Chicago Daily Tribune column and, three years later, claimed the coinage as his own.
Q 04The Mississippi Delta lies between the Mississippi River and which other river?
Yazoo
Despite the name, the region is not the river's actual delta but an alluvial plain far upstream, built up by ancient floods of both rivers.
Q 05Which is the only state that lies entirely within Appalachia?
West Virginia
The Appalachian Regional Commission's map runs from southern New York down to Mississippi and takes in every one of the state's 55 counties.
Q 06The Okefenokee Swamp straddles the border of Georgia and which state?
Florida
The peat-filled wetland covers about 438,000 acres and in 2026 became Georgia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Q 07According to one theory, the nickname 'Dixie' may derive from the surname of which person?
Surveyor Jeremiah Dixon
Competing theories credit ten-dollar 'dix' banknotes issued by a Louisiana bank, but the surveyor whose line divided free and slave states is one of the leading candidates.
Q 08Coca-Cola was first sold, for five cents a glass, at which Atlanta business in May 1886?
Jacob's Pharmacy
Two years later John Pemberton sold the rights to Asa Candler, whose marketing turned a headache tonic into a global brand.
Q 09Who came up with the name 'Coca-Cola' and its cursive logo?
Frank Robinson, Pemberton's bookkeeper
Robinson felt the two Cs would look good in advertising; Candler bought the rights in 1888 and turned the tonic into a global brand.
Q 10In which Georgia town did the first Waffle House open on Labor Day weekend in 1955?
Avondale Estates
Founders Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner were neighbors; the chain is now headquartered a few miles away in Norcross.
Q 11Which federal agency uses the 'Waffle House Index' as an informal gauge of disaster recovery?
FEMA
The logic is simple: if a Waffle House is closed, the storm was really bad; if it is open with a limited menu, the area is getting back on its feet.
Q 12Boiled peanuts are the official state snack of which state?
South Carolina
Only raw or 'green' peanuts work; fully mature dried peanuts make poor boiled peanuts.
Q 13Where did the oldest known recipe for sweet tea appear?
An 1878 Virginia community cookbook
Q 21Tabasco sauce is made on Avery Island in Louisiana, which is actually what kind of geological feature?
A salt dome
Native Americans boiled the island's briny springs for salt long before Edmund McIlhenny bottled his first pepper sauce there in 1868.
Q 22Dr Pepper was created in the 1880s by pharmacist Charles Alderton in which Texas city?
Waco
Alderton mixed it at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store, and store owner Wade Morrison was the first customer to approve.
Q 23Where did Colonel Sanders open the very first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in 1952?
South Salt Lake, Utah
Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia beat the World's Fair, often wrongly credited with inventing iced tea, by a quarter of a century.
Q 14Which soft drink is traditionally paired with a Moon Pie as the 'working man's lunch'?
RC Cola
Chattanooga Bakery says the treat was born when a salesman asked a Kentucky coal miner what he wanted and the miner asked for something 'as big as the moon'.
Q 15Pimento cheese, the 'pâté of the South', is famously served as a sandwich at which sporting event?
The Masters Tournament
Ironically the spread was born up North: an early recipe in a 1908 issue of Good Housekeeping called for cream cheese and minced pimentos.
Q 16North Alabama's distinctive 'white' barbecue sauce is built on which base?
Mayonnaise
It is cut with apple cider vinegar, sugar, salt and black pepper and traditionally slathered on smoked chicken.
Q 17The mustard-based 'Carolina Gold' barbecue sauce is usually traced to which 18th-century arrivals?
German settlers
The 18th-century Germans brought their mustard with them; eastern North Carolina, by contrast, keeps things to vinegar and pepper.
Q 18By law, bourbon must be made from a grain mixture that is at least what percentage corn?
51%
It must also be aged in new charred oak containers; Congress declared bourbon a 'distinctive product of the United States' in 1964.
Q 19Approximately what share of the world's bourbon is distilled in Kentucky?
About 95%
Bourbon can legally be made anywhere in the U.S., but Kentucky's limestone-filtered water and cooperage tradition keep it overwhelmingly a Bluegrass State product.
Q 20Georgia is the world's number one producer of which nut?
Pecan
The area around Albany in southwest Georgia is the center of production; the trees are native to the South and their nuts go into the region's signature holiday pie.
Sanders had sold chicken from his roadside restaurant in Corbin since the Depression, but franchising began far from home in Utah.
Q 24Vernon Rudolph chose Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for the first Krispy Kreme in 1937 for what reason?
His favorite cigarette company was headquartered there
Rudolph had bought his yeast-raised doughnut recipe from a Louisiana chef and sold hot doughnuts through a window to customers who came by between midnight and 4 a.m.
Q 25Cracker Barrel was founded in 1969 in which Tennessee town, where it is still headquartered?
Lebanon
Founder Dan Evins, a Shell Oil representative, conceived it as a way to sell more gasoline at highway exits; every table still has the wooden peg game.
Q 26Piggly Wiggly, which opened in Memphis in 1916, is remembered as the first grocery store to do what?
Let customers serve themselves
Founder Clarence Saunders also introduced checkout stands and price tags on individual items, and later built the Pink Palace mansion that now houses a replica of the store.
Q 27The Southern pronoun 'y'all' is a contraction of which phrase?
You all
The spelling 'you-all' was first recorded in 1824; one theory ties it to the Scots-Irish Ulster Scots phrase 'ye aw'.
Q 28Stock car racing, and eventually NASCAR, grew out of which illegal Prohibition-era trade?
Running bootleg whiskey
Drivers souped up ordinary cars to outrun the law with a trunk full of Appalachian moonshine, then started racing each other for bragging rights and money.
Q 29The Grand Ole Opry began in 1925 as a radio program under what name?
WSM Barn Dance
Announcer George D. Hay coined the new name in 1927 by joking that after an hour of 'grand opera' the station would now present 'the Grand Ole Opry'.
Q 30Congress has formally recognized which city as the 'Birthplace of Country Music'?
Bristol, Tennessee
The 1927 Bristol sessions, run by talent scout Ralph Peer, produced the first recordings of both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.