Thanks to all who made The Official "Test Your Southern I.Q." Online Olympiad such a great success. For those of you surfing onto this site for the first time, the contest, based on our book Yellow Dogs, Hushpuppies, and Bluetick Hounds: The Official Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Quiz Book, ran from April 22 to June 10, 1996. Almost 100 contestants answered--or tried to answer--forty tough questions about southern culture.
Click here to find out the winners.
For your amusement, here are the questions and the answers, exactly as they appear in the book--along with some commentary about the anwers provided by the contestants.
Category: Manners, Myth, and Religion
1. By what name are green peas known in the South?
Answer: English Peas. Just plain "peas" more often refers to field peas like black-eyed peas, crowder peas, or purple-hulled peas.
2. What popular holiday was originally celebrated by black Texans to commemorate emancipation?
Answer: Juneteenth, celebrated June 19. On that day in 1865, after the Civil War, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to command the Texas district and officially announced the freedom of slaves.
3. Who founded the Moral Majority?
Answer: Jerry Falwell (b. 1933), pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.
4. According to a study by John Shelton Reed, southerners are significantly more likely than non-southerners to say they believe in which of the following?
God
The Devil
voodoo
ghosts
Answer: The Devil
5. What tribe of native Americans is the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and also the largest federally unrecognized tribe in the United States?
Answer: The Lumbee Indian tribe numbers more than 40,000 people in Robeson and neighboring counties in southeastern North Carolina.
Note: Many people guessed either Cherokee or Seminole.
Category: Music and Entertainment
6. What "Blue Yodeler" is known as the "Father of Country Music"?
Answer: Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933), a.k.a. the "Singing Brakeman." Rodgers composed such standards as "Peach Pickin' Time in Georgia" and "T for Texas."
7. What dance was named the state dance by the South Carolina legislature in 1985?
Answer: The Shag, which since the 1950s has been danced to the "beach music" of R&B bands. "Stay," by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, is a good example of beach music.
Note: The Charleston was a frequent guess and made sense geographically, but it is incorrect.
8. What folk hero railroad engineer is immortalized in songs by Mississippi John Hurt, the Grateful Dead, and the Boy Scout songbook?
Answer: John Luther "Casey" Jones (1863-1900). On April 19, 1900, Jones was trying to make up ninety-five minutes on a run between Memphis and Canton, Mississippi, on a train called the Cannonball. In the foggy dark at Vaughan, the Cannonball rammed a sta
lled train, and Jones was killed.
9. What type of animal was Misty, and where did she live?
Answer: Misty was a pony from Chincoteague, Virginia. Like the other ponies on this Eastern Shore island, she was supposedly descended from horses who swam ashore from a capsized Spanish ship in the seventeenth century. The book by Marguerite Henry and a
1961 movie, both titled Misty of Chincoteague, are based on Misty's life with the Beebe family. You can still visit Misty at the Miniature Pony Farm in Chincoteague, where she has been preserved.
Note: We insisted that Misty be identified as a pony, not a horse. Some creative answers here included "a rat from Mississippi" and "a turtle from Louisiana."
10. What Hollywood star, a native of Waycross, Georgia, became the first real male nude centerfold when he appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1972?
Answer: Burt Reynolds (b. 1936).
11. Who wrote The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman?
Answer: Ernest Gaines (b. 1933), born in Oscar, Louisiana. Since 1982 Gaines has been professor of English and writer in residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.
Note: This "autobiography" is, in fact, a novel.
12. What 1944 best-seller, set in Georgia, portrayed a clandestine love affair between an educated young black woman and the son of a white doctor?
Answer: Strange Fruit, by Lillian Smith (1897-1966), one of the most outspoken southern liberals during the 1930s and 1940s. The book was translated into fifteen languages, banned in Boston, and produced as a Broadway play.
13. Who could not go home again, and where was home?
Answer: George Webber, in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home again (1940). Home was Libya Hill, which, like Altamont of Look Homeward, Angel (1929), was modeled on Wolfe's native Asheville, North Carolina.
Note: we also accepted "Thomas Wolfe" and "Asheville" as answers to this question.
14. According to novelist Pat Conroy, what town is "the Vatican City of Southern letters?"
Answer: Oxford, Mississippi, which at various times has been the home of writers William Faulkner, John Faulkner, Stark Young, Willie Morris, Donna Tartt, Richard Ford, Ellen Douglas, Dean and Larry Wells, John Grisham, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown.
15. What best-selling novelist was struck and killed as she crossed Peachtree Street in Atlanta?
Answer: Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), who wrote Gone with the Wind (1936).
Category: Science, Medicine, Business, and Industry
16. What agricultural educator, born into slavery in southwest Missouri, is best known for his attempts to find commercial uses for such southern crops as peanuts and sweet potatoes?
Answer: George Washington Carver (1864-1943). All his life, Carver endeavored to improve the conditions of poor and often landless black farmers in the South.
17. What drink, now consumed by athletes all over the world, was first developed by a University of Florida kidney specialist?
Answer: Gatorade. It was developed in 1965 by Dr. Robert Cade.
18. What mass-market, overnight delivery business is based in Memphis?
Answer: Federal Express, created in 1973, which now serves 185 countries and delivers to virtually every location in America.
Note: The company has now officially changed its name to FedEx, and we accepted that as a correct response.
19. Corvettes are made in only one place in the world. Where is it?
Answer: Bowling Green, Kentucky.
20. Where is fiery Texas Pete chili sauce manufactured:
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Dry Prong, Louisiana
Texas, Kentucky
Petersburg, Texas
Answer: Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the Garner family has made sauce since 1929.
Note: Not only is Texas Pete a North Carolina product, it was once the sponsor of the Texas Pete Lecture Series at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's history department.
Category: Art and Architecture
21. Whose photographs documented the horrors of the Civil War and revolutionized war reportage?
Answer: Mathew Brady (c. 1823-96).
22. What is the name of the birthplace of Robert E. Lee?
Carter's Grove
Stratford Hall
Gunston Hall
Answer: Stratford Hall, in Westmoreland County, Virginia.
23. What French Impressionist painter spent 1872 and 1873 visiting kin in New Orleans?
Answer: Edgar Degas (1834-1917). He lived in his uncle's home near Tonti and Esplanade. His family was in the cotton business, and of their livelihood Degas said, "Nothing but cotton. . . . One lives for cotton and from cotton." The bustle of the cotton
exchange office is captured in his exquisitely composed painting Portraits in an Office: The Cotton Exchange (1873), now in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Paris.
24. Established in North Carolina in 1933, this art school's faculty included some of the most influential architects and artists of the twentieth century. What was the name of the school?
Answer: Black Mountain College. Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Robert Motherwell were among those who taught there.
25. What automotive part is commonly used as a decorative planter?
Answer: The tire. Car and truck tires can be planted as is, painted, or carved and formed into decorative urns.
Category: Sports and Recreation
26. Who was the first black tennis player to win a major national tournament?
Answer: Althea Gibson (b. 1927), from North Carolina. Gibson became internationally recognized when she won tennis titles in France, Great Britain, and Italy. In 1957, she was ranked the number-one woman player in the United States, and in that year and
1958, she won the women's singles and doubles events at Wimbledon.
Note: Arthur Ashe was a frequent incorrect response to this question.
27. Wading into deep water, sticking an arm into a hollow, submerged log hoping to wrestle a catfish and not a water moccasin is a method of fishing known as what?
Answer: Grabbling.
Note: we also accepted noodling and grabbing, because they appear in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. However, we did not accept "stupid," a common response, although we sympathize with the sentiment.
28. What university has an arachnid as its mascot?
Answer: The University of Richmond's mascot is a spider.
29. What southern university's football stadium is called Death Valley?
Answer: Clemson's. The name was coined in the 1940s by Lonnie McMillian, head coach at Presbyterian College, because he lost so many games in the Clemson stadium. In the mid-1960s, a Clemson graduate presented a white flint rock from Death Valley,
California, to Clemson coach Frank Howard. The rock was placed at the top of the east endzone hill. At game time, players enter the stadium there, touch the rock, and then run down the hill, to the delight of around 80,000 screaming fans. USA Today has
called this tradition "the most exciting twenty-five seconds in college football."
30. What does NASCAR stand for?
Answer: National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. The group was formed in 1947 to standardize the rules and administration of racing.
Note: Some contestants came close, but forgot that the second "A" in NASCAR had to stand for something!
Category: The Land
31. What southern port city was named for the Maubila Indians?
Answer: Mobile, Alabama, founded in 1702 by French naval officer Jean Baptiste Le Moyne.
32. What southern tree has knees?
Answer: The cypress, which is relatively resistant to water and can grow in swamps, where its stalagmite-like knees rise above the water and help aerate the tree.
33. What state is the top exporter of collard greens?
Answer: Georgia. From the last week of October through May, seven companies around the Cairo, Georgia, area ship 315 tons of collards weekly to the major northeastern metropolitan areas. Half of those collards go to New York City alone.
34. Florida has more Atlantic shoreline than any other southern state.
True
False
Answer: False. Measured to the tidewater line, North Carolina has more shoreline on the Atlantic side than Florida does--3,375 miles, to Florida's 3,331.
35. Thomas Jefferson actually owned what natural wonder?
Answer: Natural Bridge, Virginia
Category: History, Politics, and Law
36. Who was the first African American ever to be elected governor?
Answer: L. Douglas Wilder (b. 1931), who was elected governor of Virginia in 1990. In 1969, he became the first African American state senator in Virginia since Reconstruction.
37. Who was "Old Hickory"?
Answer: General Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), of South Carolina and
Tennessee, whose troops defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.
38. What Arkansas woman became a media favorite during the Watergate hearings by claiming she was drugged and forcibly prevented from speaking out on the involvement of her husband, a high-ranking Nixon administration official?
Answer: Martha Elizabeth Beall Jennings Mitchell (1918-76), whose blunt and humorous comments on Watergate were both derided and praised. An anonymous floral tribute at her funeral read, "Martha was right."
Note: A special congratulations to all those who remembered the
difference between Margaret and Martha Mitchell (see question 15)!
39. What civil rights leader became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1976?
Answer: Andrew Young (b. 1932), who was appointed by Jimmy Carter.
40. Who won a special election in 1973 to fill her missing husband's congressional seat?
Answer: Corinne "Lindy" Boggs of Lousiana, whose husband, Hale, went down in an Alaskan plane crash in 1973 and was presumed dead. His body was never found.
Note: Congratulations to those knowledgeable contestants who knew that Lindy Boggs is the mother of NPR's Cokie Roberts.
More information, including ordering info, is available for Yellow Dogs, Hushpuppies, and Bluetick Hounds and the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
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