Southern Trivia
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99 free Southern trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
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 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which boundary, surveyed in the 1760s between Pennsylvania and Maryland, became shorthand for the divide between North and South?
The Mason-Dixon line
The Mason-Dixon line was run from 1763 to 1767 by English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to end a long border quarrel between the two colonies; decades later it came to divide free states from slave states.
Q 02Which city was the largest in the American South by population in the 2020 census?
Houston
Houston counted about 2.3 million residents in 2020, ahead of San Antonio and Dallas; Atlanta, for all its fame, had fewer than half a million people inside its city limits.
Q 03Which Southern nickname did H. L. Mencken claim to have coined?
The Bible Belt
The Bible Belt has been traced to a 1920s newspaper column by Mencken, the Baltimore journalist who went to Tennessee in 1925 to cover the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' and mock the anti-evolution side.
Q 04Which is the only state that lies entirely within Appalachia?
West Virginia
West Virginia has all 55 of its counties inside the Appalachian Regional Commission's map, which runs from southern New York to northern Mississippi; the state was born in 1863 after pro-Union western Virginians rejected secession.
Q 05The Okefenokee Swamp straddles the border of Georgia and which state?
Florida
Florida holds the swamp's southern edge; the Okefenokee's dark water feeds two rivers that rise in it, the Suwannee, which runs to the Gulf, and the St. Marys, which forms part of the state line with Georgia.
Q 06Which song, first performed by a minstrel troupe in New York in 1859, became the Confederacy's unofficial anthem?
Dixie
Dixie is usually credited to Ohio-born Dan Emmett of Bryant's Minstrels, and Abraham Lincoln loved it: the day after Lee's surrender he had a band play it for a White House crowd, saying the Union had fairly captured it.
Q 07Coca-Cola was first sold in May 1886, at five cents a glass, in which kind of Atlanta business?
A pharmacy
A pharmacy: drugstore soda fountains were in fashion because fizzy water was thought good for the health, and Jacobs' Pharmacy sold the new syrup mixed with it as one more tonic.
Q 08By Coca-Cola's own account, why did Frank Robinson want two Cs in the drink's name?
They'd look good in ads
They'd look good in ads: the company says John Pemberton's bookkeeper thought 'the two Cs would look well in advertising', then penned the script logo himself; Robinson's own account was that the name was euphonious.
Q 09Which Kentucky cave system, protected as a national park, is the longest known in the world?
Mammoth Cave
Mammoth Cave has more than 400 miles of mapped passages, and explorers say there is no end in sight; in 1972 cavers linked it to the even longer Flint Ridge caves next door, making one giant system.
Q 10Which federal agency informally reads the 'Waffle House Index' to judge how hard a storm has hit?
FEMA
FEMA picked the idea up from its chief Craig Fugate, who coined the index: the chain so rarely closes that a shut Waffle House tells responders the damage is really bad.
Q 11Which food did South Carolina name its official state snack in 2006?
Boiled peanuts
Boiled peanuts became South Carolina's official snack food in a law careful to add that no school need serve peanuts to students with food allergies.
Q 12Housekeeping in Old Virginia, an 1870s cookbook, holds the oldest known recipe for which iconic Southern drink?
Sweet tea
Sweet tea in Marion Cabell Tyree's recipe was brewed from green tea and sugared in the glass, a quarter-century before the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair that is often wrongly credited with inventing iced tea.
Q 13Which soft drink is traditionally paired with a Moon Pie as the 'working man's lunch'?
RC Cola
Q 21Dr Pepper was created in the 1880s by Charles Alderton in which Texas city?
Waco
Waco was briefly the drink's name too: fountain patrons would ask for a 'Waco' before owner Wade Morrison named it, and Alderton left the drink for Morrison to build into a business.
Q 22Which chain's first franchise opened in Utah in 1952, far from its founder's roadside café in the South?
KFC
KFC's first franchisee was Salt Lake restaurateur Pete Harman, whose sign painter suggested the name Kentucky Fried Chicken; Harman also gave the chain its bucket, after filling a surplus batch with chicken.
Q 23As the story goes, why did Vernon Rudolph open the first Krispy Kreme in Winston-Salem?
His favorite cigarettes were made there
RC Cola and a Moon Pie each cost a nickel in the Depression and came in bigger servings than their rivals, the likeliest reason the ten-cent pair became the 'working man's lunch'; Big Bill Lister sang about it in the 1950s.
Q 14Pimento cheese, the 'pâté of the South', is famously served as a sandwich at which sporting event?
The Masters Tournament
The Masters Tournament has sold the sandwich for decades, yet the spread was born up North: an early recipe in a 1908 issue of Good Housekeeping called for cream cheese and minced pimentos.
Q 15North Alabama's distinctive 'white' barbecue sauce is built on which base?
Mayonnaise
Mayonnaise is the base of the white sauce Big Bob Gibson created in Decatur in 1925, sharpened with cider vinegar and black pepper; it began as a dressing for smoked chicken and has since spread to pork.
Q 16The mustard-based 'Carolina Gold' barbecue sauce is usually traced to which 18th-century arrivals?
German settlers
German settlers were drawn to the Midlands around Columbia by colonial land grants, and that is still where the yellow mustard sauce rules; in the Pee Dee to the northeast, pitmasters keep to vinegar and hot pepper.
Q 17By law, bourbon must be made from a grain mixture that is at least 51% which grain?
Corn
Corn must make up at least 51% of the mash, and the whiskey must age in charred new oak barrels; since each barrel can be used only once, retired ones move on to other jobs, such as aging Tabasco's pepper mash.
Q 18Where does federal law allow bourbon to be made?
Anywhere in the US
Anywhere in the US will do, so long as the recipe and barrel rules are met; Kentucky's distillers nonetheless count about 95% of the world's supply as their own.
Q 19Which nut grows on the official state tree of Texas?
Pecan
Pecan trees were feeding people long before Texas honored them in 1919: Native Americans gathered the wild nuts as a staple and made a milky drink from them.
Q 20Tabasco sauce is made on Avery Island in Louisiana, which is actually what kind of geological feature?
A salt dome
A salt dome: Native Americans boiled the island's briny springs for salt long before Edmund McIlhenny first made his pepper sauce there in 1868.
His favorite cigarettes were made there: Rudolph is said to have bet on the town after learning Camel was based in Winston-Salem; once there, he cut a hole in his bakery wall to sell hot doughnuts straight to passers-by.
Q 24Which roadside chain began in 1969 as a plan to sell more Shell gasoline?
Cracker Barrel
Cracker Barrel's first store, outside Lebanon, Tennessee, had gas pumps out front, as did every early location; when the fuel shortages of the 1970s hit, the chain began building without them and kept the country cooking.
Q 25Piggly Wiggly, which opened in Memphis in 1916, won fame as a grocery store that did what?
Let customers serve themselves
Let customers serve themselves: in most groceries of the day a clerk fetched every item on a shopper's list. Clarence Saunders made a fortune from the idea, then lost it all trying to corner Piggly Wiggly's stock.
Q 26The Southern pronoun 'y'all' fills which gap in standard English?
Plural 'you'
Plural 'you' is the form standard English lacks, since 'you' serves for one person or many; the South fills the gap with y'all, short for 'you all', as other regions do with 'you guys' or 'you-uns'.
Q 27Stock car racing, and eventually NASCAR, grew out of which illegal Prohibition-era trade?
Running bootleg whiskey
Running bootleg whiskey took ordinary-looking Ford coupes with souped-up engines that could outrun government agents; the drivers took to racing one another, and Bill France organized them into NASCAR.
Q 28The Grand Ole Opry began in 1925 as a radio program under what name?
WSM Barn Dance
WSM Barn Dance got its lasting name in 1927, when announcer George D. Hay followed a program of classical music by saying listeners had heard Grand Opera and would now hear 'the Grand Ole Opry'.
Q 29Which city on the Tennessee-Virginia line has Congress recognized as the 'Birthplace of Country Music'?
Bristol, Tennessee
Bristol, Tennessee, housed Ralph Peer's makeshift studio in 1927, where the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers made their first records; the sessions are often called the 'big bang' of country music.
Q 30Jazz originated in the African-American communities of which Southern city?
New Orleans
New Orleans mixed brass-band marches and ragtime into the new music, which grew up in everyday city life: bands played for funerals, picnics, ball games and neighborhood dances.