Why, Why, Why, Delilah Trivia Quiz

Answer: Tom Jones

Originally recorded in November, 1967 by P.J. Proby who disliked it and did not include it on his subsequent album. It was then made a massive hit by Tom Jones in 1968, reaching number one in several countries though it only made number two in Jones' native UK and number fifteen on the Billboard Hot 100.

A man discovers that Delilah has been sleeping with another man, so when her new man leaves, the singer shows up at her door and stabs her to death in a crime of passion. The bleakness of the lyrics is offset by the lilting rhythm and a catchy chorus. As such the song features in many a (drunken) singalong.

Why Delilah? Lyric writer Barry Mason stated in a 2001 interview with "The Sun" newspaper that he based the song (without the murder) on a girl he met in Blackpool, England when he was on summer holidays aged 15. They had a summer romance, but when it came time for her to return to her home in Llandudno in Wales, she told Mason that she had a boyfriend at home, and it was over between them. Mason is quoted in the paper as saying, "I was shattered. I never shook it off and I became sick with jealousy and a whole lot of pain. She had dark hair, brooding eyes and she was really feisty. If there's a typical Welsh girl, she was the one." Her name was Delia, which impossibly did not fit into the song he wrote ten years later. Working with Les Reed (music) he had the idea to change her name to Delilah, which then became the famous song. "The Sun" searched for Delia asking readers to call the newspaper if they knew Delia from Llandudno. The search ended when Sylvan Mason, who co-wrote the song (and was belatedly credited) said there was no Delia. She stated Les Reed had already written the chorus "Why, why, why Delilah," and the lyric was based on the 1954 musical "Carmen Jones". "Les Reed's idea was to write a modern-day Samson and Delilah song but we got carried away and it ended up like Carmen Jones," she told "WalesOnline", The line "I was lost like a slave that no man could free" was the remaining reference to the biblical Samson story, and fitted the new story so was left in the song.

The song tempo is unusual that it is in triple time when most pop music is in quadruple time.

Answer: The fictitious name of a Parisian prostitute

This song is about the singer who falls in love with a prostitute. Sting wrote the song after walking through the red-light district of Paris when The Police were in the French city to play a club called "The Nashville". Nearby he saw prostitutes. He postulated what it would feel like to fall in love with one of them, as he surmised some of them must have partners. Sting chose the name Roxanne "because it has a rich history behind it. Roxanne was the name of Alexander The Great's wife and Cyrano de Bergerac's girlfriend". he said in a 1979 BBC interview.

The hit was modest by The Police's standard, reaching number twelve in the group's UK and number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Joey's girlfriend in "Bread" was Roxy.

Answer: Patti Smith

"Gloria" was a modest US hit for Northern Ireland band, Them. It was written by their lead singer Van Morrison about a girl who comes by for sexual liaisons though with nothing explicit in the lyrics.

"Gloria" by U2 was a modest hit in the UK. The song reflects the Christian beliefs of three of the band members and features a chorus sung in Latin. "Gloria in te Domine, Gloria exultate" translates as "Glory in You, Lord / Glory, exalt [Him]" a reference to Psalm 30:2. There are also references to Colossians 2:9-10 ("Only in You I'm complete") and James 5:7-9 ("The door is open, You're standing there"). While it has nothing to do with Them's earlier song of the same name, Bono was reputedly pleased when the two songs were compared.

Laura Branigan recorded her version of "Gloria" on her debut 1982 album where it reached top ten in both US and UK. It gained Ms Branigan a Grammy nomination. This song was originally an Italian pop song recorded by Umberto Tozzi in 1979.

Patti Smith released her iconic album "Horses" in 1975. Opening the album was a re-working of Them's "Gloria" though the lyrics were radically changed and based around a Ms Smith poem that contained the line "Jesus died for somebody sins but not mine." She even changed the name to "Gloria: In Excelsis Deo". However with the opening piano chords there is no doubt about the origins of the song.

Answer: Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds

The "Lucy" who inspired this song was Lucy O'Donnell who was a classmate of John's son Julian when he was enrolled at the Surrey (UK) private school. In a 1975 interview Mr Lennon said, "Julian came in one day with a picture about a school friend of his named Lucy. He had sketched in some stars in the sky and called it Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." Mr Lennon then said he wrote the song almost immediately thereafter in 1967. "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes" was supposedly Yoko Ono. In a 2016 interview with the singer Donovan who went to India with the Beatles, he stated that "John painted images in his head that became the lyrics for songs... 'Picture yourself on a boat on a river' - you're actually in a movie or you're in a painting. 'Tangerine trees and marmalade skies' - he's painting".

The BBC refused to play the song as it thought it referred to LSD hallucinations, which was refuted by Mr Lennon. However Paul McCartney did not help matters when he admitted to the world press in 1967 that the Beatle took LSD in a press conference: "'Day Tripper,' that's one about acid (LSD). 'Lucy in the Sky,' that's pretty obvious. There's others that make subtle hints about drugs, but, you know, it's easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles' music."

"Michelle" (1965) was inspired by Mr McCartney flirting with French though he knew few French words. He started with "Michelle, ma belle." McCartney came up with the next line, "These are words that go together well," and was taught the French translation, "Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble," which he used in the song as well. It is not about any particular girl,

"Dear Prudence" (1968) is about Prudence Farrow, Mia's sister. The former was in India at the same time as The Beatles where Mr Lennon would tease Ms Farrow about meditating too much and not joining in the group activities.

Mr McCartney has stated several times that "Lady Madonna" (1968) is a tribute to "women everywhere". It was inspired by a photo of a woman in the January 1965 issue of National Geographic where a women was feeding her child in Vietnam over the caption "Mountain Madonna."

Answer: Lola was a man

This 1970 song is about a guy who meets a girl called Lola in a club, and takes her home. The twist is when we find out that Lola is a man.

In "The Kinks: The Official Biography", songwriter Ray Davies "wrote the lyrics after their manager got drunk at a club and started dancing with what he thought was a woman. Toward the end of the night, his stubble started showing" but their manager was too drunk to notice. However in 2016, Mr Davies told another version to "Q Magazine": "The song came out of an experience in a club in Paris. I was dancing with this beautiful blonde, then we went out into the daylight and I saw her stubble". In a previous interview with "Rolling Stone" in 2014 he told "Rolling Stone" why this song didn't cause an uproar because of its storyline: "The subject matter was concealed," he said. "It's a crafty way of writing. I wrote, 'She woke up next to me,' and people think it's a woman. The story unfolds better than if the song were called 'I Dated a Drag Queen'."

One of the lines "You drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola" was originally recorded as "it tastes just like Coca-Cola." The BBC refused to play the song because of the commercial product listing, so Ray Davies had to fly from New York to London to change the lyric to get the song on the air in his home country.

The option "Lola was a showgirl with a dress cut down to there" is a reference to Barry Manilow's "Copacabana" which featured a showgirl called Lola who had a "dress cut down to there".

Answer: Mark Knopfler

This 1980 Dire Straits' song which reached top ten in the UK was the second track on "Making Movies" (1980). The song was inspired by Mark Knopfler's failed romance with Holly Vincent, (Holly And The Italians) as revealed in a 2016 interview with Jon Kutner.

Some of the lyrics indicate that Knopfler felt he was used by Ms Vincent to boost her own career. "Now you just say, oh Romeo, yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him," came from a 1987 interview where Holly Vincent was quoted "What happened was that I had a scene with Mark Knopfler and it got to the point where he couldn't handle it and we split up." Another line "He's underneath the window she's singing, 'hey la my boyfriend's back'" is a tribute to the Angels' hit "My Boyfriend's Back" (1963).

Answer: The Singing Nun

The story of Sister Luc-Gabrielle (born Jeanine Deckers) known as the Singing Nun was a sad one. Asked by her convent elders in Belgium to write a song to contribute to an album the order could distribute as gifts, Sister Luc-Gabrielle wrote about St Dominic. In fact an entire album was recorded by her but it wasn't until "Dominique" was released as a single in 1963 was there any reaction in the US. The single rocketed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and top ten in the UK. The sung was sung in her native French and most listeners had no idea what the song was about, but her voice and the melody was very upbeat and pleasant despite the lyrics which were bleak, describing St. Dominic's fight to establish the order, even though he was humiliated and labeled a heretic.

So far so good.

Sister Luc-Gabrielle then left the convent to pursue a recording career, under her real name. She became a rebel, with singles about the newly released contraceptive pill: "Glory Be to God for the Golden Pill," She was chased by the Belgian government for unpaid taxes relating to "Dominique" (all proceeds from the song went to the order, but she still had to pay the tax bill). She suffered subsequent drug problems.
In 1985, Jeanine Deckers and her long term partner, Annie Pecher, committed suicide by overdose. Their autistic children's centre had had to close, and they "lost all courage in the face of a losing battle with the tax people."

Answer: George Harrison

Eric Clapton wrote "Layla" in 1970 when he was with Derek and the Dominoes. It went to number four on the UK charts and top ten on the Billboard Hot 100. Ostensibly it told the story by Persian poet Nizami of "Layla and Majnun", a man in love with a woman who cannot have her because her parents refused. When they cannot be a couple, he went insane. Mr Clapton wrote the song to woo Pattie Boyd, the "Layla" in the song. The only problem was Ms Boyd was married to one George Harrison at the time. The song worked and the split and subsequent union was amicable, with Mr Harrison performing at Ms Boyd's second wedding, to Mr Clapton. This was confirmed in a 2005 CNN interview with Ms Boyd by Todd Leopold.

Duane Allman came up with the famous guitar riff and played lead with Clapton playing rhythm guitar on the song. An edited version was released as a single in 1971. The song was edited down to 2:43 and made no impression on the charts. The full, (7:10) version was released a year later and became a hit. Mr Allman died around the same time in October 1971 from a motorbike accident.

Answer: Yes

Neil Diamond wrote this song about his second wife Marcia Murphey who he married in 1969 (divorced 1995). In a 2014 interview with Lisa Respers from CNN, Mr Diamond revealed "I was writing a song in Memphis, Tennessee, for a session. I needed a three-syllable name," Diamond said during an appearance on "Today." "The song was about my wife at the time - her name was Marsha [sic] - and I couldn't get a 'Marsha' rhyme."

However in 2007, Diamond performed this song via a satellite hook-up at Caroline Kennedy's 50th birthday party, and stated the song was about her. Mr Diamond said he was young and poor in the sixties when he saw a picture of Carolyn Kennedy "It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony. It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there." Several years later, Diamond wrote the song in an hour in a Memphis hotel.

Only one of the stories can be correct.

Answer: Rikki Don't Lose that Number

Henry Gross was the first guitarist for New York group Sha Na Na and was the youngest performer at Woodstock being 18 in 1969. He had a notable career as a solo artist but had his only US Billboard Hot 00 top ten hit with "Shannon", a song about about the passing of Beach Boy Carl Wilson's Irish Setter. The falsetto vocals on "Shannon" was a tribute to Beach Boy member Brian Wilson.

"Helen Wheels" was a song on Paul McCartney's 1973 "Band on the Run". In a 2012 interview with "Rolling Stone", Mr McCartney revealed his first wife's Land Rover was nicknamed "Helen Wheels".

Although he wrote a number one hit for the Monkees ("I'm a Believer"), Neil Diamond's first Billboard Hot 100 number one (Top ten in UK) was "Cracklin' Rose" which was a bottle of wine. it was inspired by a folk tale of an Indian tribe in Northern Canada who had more men than women. Mr Diamond told "Rolling Stone": "On Saturday nights when they go out, the guys all get their girl; the guys without girls get a bottle of Cracklin' Rosie, that's their girl for the weekend."

"Rikki Don't Lose That Number" was Steely Dan's biggest hit reaching number four on the Billboard Hot 100 though it did not reach top forty in the UK. In a 2006 "Entertainment Weekly" interview. the girl in the the title is Rikki Ducornet, who was a New York artist and writer. One half of Steely Dan Donald Fagen met her while both were studying at an upstate New York College. Ms Ducornet was both pregnant and married at the time, Mr Fagen gave her his number (but not in the same context as the song). Mrs Ducornet was apparently impressed by Mr Fagen and was tempted to call but she decided not to so never did.