We Didn't Start the Fire Trivia
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48 free We Didn't Start the Fire trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Billy Joel wrote the words before the music, and the words are a forty-year newsreel: well over a hundred names, headlines and fads packed into one single, from the year he was born to the summer the record came out. Most people can sing along; far fewer can say who Roy Cohn was, why Dacron made the cut, or what happened in Budapest. These 48 questions work through the list roughly in order: the Cold War flashpoints and the space race, the presidents and the dictators, the Oscar winners, the ballplayers and boxers, the novels that got banned and the toys that sold by the million. A handful cover the record itself: the album it came from, the Grammy it lost, and the 2023 cover that tried to pick up where Joel left off. Play it to see how much of the newsreel you actually know, or print it for a music-night round where the theme song writes itself.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1989 Billy Joel album, produced by Foreigner's Mick Jones, carries We Didn't Start the Fire?
Storm Front
Storm Front became Billy Joel's third US No. 1 album, made after a band shake-up that ended bassist Doug Stegmeyer's 15 years at his side.
Q 02Whose 21-year-old friend told Billy Joel it was a terrible time to be 21, sparking We Didn't Start the Fire?
Sean Lennon
Sean Lennon's friend insisted nothing had happened in the fifties, and Joel fired back by asking whether he had never heard of the Korean War, the seed of the lyric.
Q 03Which everyday noise did Billy Joel compare the melody of We Didn't Start the Fire to in a 1993 interview?
A dentist drill
A dentist drill was Joel's verdict on the tune in a 1993 documentary; he wrote the words first, which he rarely does, and blamed that for the lack of melody.
Q 04Which band's 2023 update of We Didn't Start the Fire covers 1989 onwards yet never mentions the COVID-19 pandemic?
Fall Out Boy
Fall Out Boy's update abandons the original's rough chronological order, and Pete Wentz said the pandemic was left out on purpose.
Q 05Which Hitchcock thriller's screeching violins are quoted in We Didn't Start the Fire when it is name-checked?
Psycho
Psycho's shrieking violins come from Bernard Herrmann's strings-only score, which he said gave a black-and-white sound to match the black-and-white film.
Q 06Which singer, killed in a 1959 Iowa plane crash, gets a mimicked vocal hiccup in We Didn't Start the Fire?
Buddy Holly
Buddy Holly died alongside Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper near Clear Lake, Iowa, after chartering a plane to escape the freezing tour buses.
Q 07Which researcher, asked on television who owned the patent on his 1955 polio vaccine, said the people did?
Jonas Salk
Jonas Salk gave that answer to Edward R. Murrow, asking 'Could you patent the sun?', and the vaccine was never patented.
Q 08Which king's death in February 1952 reached his daughter Elizabeth at a Kenyan lodge, making her queen mid-tour?
George VI
George VI died in his sleep at Sandringham on the night Elizabeth spent at Treetops, where a fellow guest wrote that she climbed a tree a princess and came down a queen.
Q 09Which composer of Peter and the Wolf died on 5 March 1953, the same day as Joseph Stalin?
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev's funeral drew about 30 mourners, because the crowds flooding the city centre to mourn Stalin made the Composers' Union hall impossible to reach.
Q 10Which seamstress's December 1955 arrest on a Montgomery, Alabama bus launched a 381-day boycott?
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks had stopped at a drugstore on her way to the bus, and the boycott she set off ended only when Browder v. Gayle ruled bus segregation unconstitutional.
Q 11Which president held up a Chicago Tribune edition that wrongly announced his defeat two days after the 1948 election?
Harry Truman
Harry Truman was handed the early edition at St. Louis Union Station on his way to Washington, and the Tribune had once called him a nincompoop.
Q 12Which Soviet satellite, launched in October 1957, beeped a signal that amateur radio operators could pick up worldwide?
Sputnik 1
Sputnik 1 beeped for three weeks until its batteries died, and the shock of its launch led the United States to create NASA the following year.
Q 13Which actor died at 24 in a 1955 Porsche crash, then received the first posthumous Best Actor Oscar nomination?
James Dean
Q 21Which Apollo 11 astronaut stayed alone in lunar orbit aboard Columbia while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?
Michael Collins
Michael Collins inspected the lunar module Eagle as it pirouetted before him, checking its landing gear had deployed before it headed down to the surface.
Q 22Near which Beijing landmark did a lone man halt a column of tanks on 5 June 1989?
Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square had been cleared by force the day before; on nearby Chang'an Avenue the man climbed onto the lead tank to speak to its crew before being pulled away.
Q 23Which physicist, who died in Princeton in April 1955, was offered the presidency of Israel after Chaim Weizmann's death?
Albert Einstein
James Dean made only three films as a star, and two of them, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, opened after his death, the second bringing another posthumous nomination.
Q 14Which Oscar-winning actress retired at 26 to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco in April 1956?
Grace Kelly
Grace Kelly met Rainier at a photo session arranged while she led the US delegation to the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, and High Society was her last film.
Q 15Which Dallas nightclub owner shot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television two days after the Kennedy assassination?
Jack Ruby
Jack Ruby's shooting of Oswald appears on the burning backdrop of the song's video; his death sentence was overturned in 1966, but he died before the new trial could begin.
Q 16Which astronaut, the first American to orbit Earth in 1962, flew again on shuttle Discovery at age 77?
John Glenn
John Glenn won his Discovery seat by volunteering as a test subject for studies of ageing, making him the only person to fly in both the Mercury and Shuttle programs.
Q 17Who became the first American woman in space aboard Challenger's STS-7 mission in June 1983?
Sally Ride
Sally Ride was only the third woman in space: Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had flown 20 years earlier, long before NASA accepted women as astronauts.
Q 18In which California city did Disneyland open in July 1955, its chaotic preview day remembered as Black Sunday?
Anaheim
Anaheim's 160 acres of orange groves and walnut trees were chosen after a Stanford Research Institute study, and the park is the only one built under Walt Disney's direct supervision.
Q 19Which country's 1956 uprising against Soviet control was crushed within weeks by Red Army tanks?
Hungary
Hungary's revolt saw Imre Nagy's government declare withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and about 200,000 people fled the country afterwards, most of them to Austria.
Q 20Which game show, on air since 1975, saw Pat Sajak replace Chuck Woolery as host in 1981?
Wheel of Fortune
Wheel of Fortune grew out of a 1973 Merv Griffin pilot called Shopper's Bazaar, whose shopping element was added at the request of NBC's daytime chief Lin Bolen to add glamour.
Albert Einstein declined, writing that he was deeply moved but at once saddened and ashamed that he could not accept, while Ben-Gurion had privately fretted about what to do if he said yes.
Q 24Which pop star's hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984, at the height of the cola wars?
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson suffered second-degree burns to his scalp when pyrotechnics misfired on set, and the cola wars he fronted are the last thing Billy Joel lists in the song.
Q 25Which Queens band, formed in 1974, had every member adopt the same fake surname, inspired by a Paul McCartney alias?
Ramones
The Ramones took the name from Paul Ramon, McCartney's early stage alias, and their July 1976 London shows, where they met the Sex Pistols and the Clash, helped fire up British punk.
Q 26Which actress got small roles in All About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle, both 1950, through agent Johnny Hyde?
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe's agent Johnny Hyde won her a seven-year contract with 20th Century-Fox in December 1950, then died of a heart attack days later.
Q 27Which frontiersman did Disney's 1954–55 TV serial, starring Fess Parker, turn into a nationwide coonskin-cap craze?
Davy Crockett
Davy Crockett's five episodes were re-cut into two cinema films, and historians credit them with making him the most famous frontiersman in American history.
Q 28Which 1951 novel about a teenager expelled from a Pennsylvania prep school has sold more than 65 million copies?
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye was J. D. Salinger's only novel, and the attention it brought drove him into seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he published nothing after 1965.
Q 29Which Soviet leader's 1956 Secret Speech to a closed Party congress session denounced Stalin's cult of personality?
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev's speech was meant to stay secret, but it was known worldwide within two weeks and The New York Times printed it in full that June.
Q 30Whose cover of The Twist topped the Hot 100 in both 1960 and 1962, a first for any single?
Chubby Checker
Chubby Checker's stage name was Dick Clark's wife's idea, a play on Fats Domino, after she heard him impersonate the singer.