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50 free We Didn't Start the Fire trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 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 was Billy Joel's third album to reach No. 1 in the US, and Mick Jones was recommended to him as producer by Eddie Van Halen.
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, who had just turned 40, fired back with the Korean War and the Suez Crisis, the seeds 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 own verdict on the tune, which he called a terrible piece of music, and it is the only song in his catalogue where he wrote the words before the music.
Q 04Which band's 2023 cover of We Didn't Start the Fire was panned for leaving out the COVID-19 pandemic?
Fall Out Boy
Fall Out Boy's version runs from 1989 to 2023 but drops the chronological order, and Pete Wentz said the pandemic lost its place to a rhyme for Bush v. Gore.
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 strings come from Bernard Herrmann's all-string score, written for a string orchestra because the budget would not stretch to a full ensemble.
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's polio vaccine, declared safe in April 1955, was never patented because he said the people owned it?
Jonas Salk
Jonas Salk gave that answer to Edward R. Murrow on television and was hailed as a miracle worker, choosing to take no profit so the vaccine could spread worldwide.
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 while Elizabeth and Philip were at Sagana Lodge in Kenya after a night at the Treetops Hotel, on the first leg of a tour bound for Australia and New Zealand.
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 transmitted for three weeks before its batteries died, and its 65-degree orbit carried it over virtually the whole inhabited Earth.
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 22Where in Beijing did a lone man halt a column of tanks on 5 June 1989, a day after troops cleared it?
Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square's student-led protests had run since 15 April, and China declared martial law on 20 May, mobilising at least 30 army divisions.
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 was nominated for East of Eden and again for Giant the following year, making him the only actor with two posthumous acting nominations.
Q 14Which Oscar-winning actress retired at 26 to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco in April 1956?
Grace Kelly
Grace Kelly had won Best Actress for 1954's The Country Girl, and High Society, released in 1956, was her final acting role before she left for Monaco.
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 is one of the images on the burning backdrop that Joel pounds a table in front of in the We Didn't Start the Fire video; Ruby was a Chicago-born operator of Dallas nightclubs.
Q 16Which astronaut, the first American to orbit Earth in 1962, flew again on shuttle Discovery at age 77?
John Glenn
John Glenn is the only person to have flown in both the Mercury and Space Shuttle programs, and he had the name Friendship 7 hand-painted on his 1962 capsule.
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, after two Soviet cosmonauts, and her STS-7 flight was the first on which the orbiting Shuttle was photographed.
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 lasted 15 days before Red Army tanks crushed it?
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 two soft-drink rivals, the last reference in We Didn't Start the Fire, hired Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul?
Coke and Pepsi
Coke and Pepsi's duel even singed its biggest star: pyrotechnics set Michael Jackson's hair on fire while he filmed a Pepsi commercial in January 1984.
Q 25Which Queens band, formed in 1974, had every member adopt the same fake surname, inspired by a Paul McCartney alias?
Ramones
The Ramones borrowed Paul Ramon, the stage name McCartney used in the Silver Beetles days, though none of the four were actually related.
Q 26Which actress got small roles in All About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle, both 1950, through agent Johnny Hyde?
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, made six films in 1950, and All About Eve went on to collect 14 Oscar nominations.
Q 27Which frontiersman did Disney's 1954–55 TV serial, starring Fess Parker, turn into a $300 million 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's Holden Caulfield became an icon of teenage rebellion, and his school, Pencey Prep, sits in the fictional town of Agerstown, Pennsylvania.
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.