Match Your Grammy Knowledge Against Last Night’s ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestants
Written by djfrosty on September 26, 2024
Jeopardy! contestants are expected to know a little bit about everything. They can be a leading authority on the World Series, but that doesn’t do them a bit of good if the categories before them are Shakespeare, U.S. History and 20th Century Women.
On Wednesday (Sept. 25), one of the categories was Grammy Winners for Album of the Year.
The first sign that the contestants were not music experts was that they steered clear of the category for much of the game. When they finally did go there, they collectively came up with just two correct questions.
If you’re a music expert, you would probably have gotten four or five right. (One of them was hard, for reasons we’ll explain.) But then, we’re all music fans here. Give us Ancient Greece as a category and it will be our turn to struggle.
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Here are the two the contestants collectively got right. Would you have also gotten them?
- “This Whitney Houston soundtrack won the award in 1994.” The correct question: “What is The Bodyguard?”
- “The first woman to win the category, Ms. Garland, took the prize for Judy at this New York City venue.” The correct question: “What is Carnegie Hall?”
And here are two where no one even ventured a guess.
- “The first of Taylor Swift’s record four album of the year Grammys was for this album in 2010.” The correct question: “What is Fearless?”
- “Billy Joel was a ‘Big Shot’ in 1980, winning for this album that bears of the name of a thoroughfare.” The correct question: “What is 52nd Street?”
Here’s one where a contestant took a crack at it and missed.
- “Dreamland by Glass Animals might be the response to this album that made Billie Eilish the category’s youngest winner ever.” The correct question: “What is When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”
The convoluted phrasing of this question — The Glass Animals reference was meant to be a clue, but it probably just threw the contestants off — made this a hard one. One of the contestants ventured, ‘What is Sleep?’ Another factor: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? is a long title, and even if you know it, it’s hard to get all those words exactly right – especially under such pressure. (Professional editors have been known to have to double-check it, even all these years later, to make sure they have it right!)
Jeopardy! was created by TV legend Merv Griffin, who had a top 10 hit on Billboard’s Best Sellers pop chart in 1949 as the lead vocalist (“boy singer” was an oft-used term in that era) for Freddy Martin and His Orchestra. Their novelty song, “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” reached No. 8 on Best Sellers that December.
Come to think of it, that sounds like fodder for a good Jeopardy! question.