My Ohio Roots And “Hang On Sloopy”

by Kevin Burton

   The shirt I had just bought said “Sweet Home Kansas’ or “Down Home in Kansas,” something like that, and it was supposed to make a statement.

   With decidedly mixed emotions I had just taken a job in Kansas and left my homeland, Ohio, behind. The shirt was one way of convincing myself that I had made the right move.

   With my purchase in tow, and as a re-born Kansan (I went to college in Kansas) I got back to the car, driven by my friend Becky.

   And then the God who created heaven and earth, saw to it that the very next song to come from the car radio was “Hang On Sloopy” by the McCoys.

   “Hang On Sloopy” is the quintessential Ohio song. It immediately takes me back to Saturday afternoons in Columbus, Ohio State University football and the marching band, “The Best Damn band in the Land” as it is accurately called, playing the song. It gets my Buckeye blood pumping like no other song.

   On that day though my heart was in my throat, tears in my eyes and I felt an ache. This was palpable. This was real.

   Though I had signed up for life in Kansas, thus taking the boy out of Ohio, it was going to take more than a Kansas t-shirt to take Ohio out of the boy.

   All this came to mind when McCoys lead singer Rick Derringer died May 26 at age 77. I was preparing for a road trip then and haven’t had time to write about him or the McCoys until now.

   Page 7 readers know that I have way too much pop music trivia rattling around my brain. But I didn’t know much about the McCoys or Derringer. I never knew who performed “Hang On Sloopy,” though the song was an unofficial state anthem and in 1985 became the official rock song of the state of Ohio.

   I wondered idly if “sloopy” had anything to do with “snoopy” but never looked into it.

   What we now know as “Hang On Sloopy” began its chart history under its original name “My Girl Sloopy” The R&B group The Vibrations took their version to number 26 in 1964.The song is credited to songwriters Bert Burns and Wes Farrell.

   The renamed McCoys version was released in 1965, on Bang Records. It rose to number 1 on Oct. 2, 1065, knocking Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” out of the top spot.

   “Rick Derringer has claimed that The McCoys version was the record label’s attempt to make a ‘white song’ out of it. (The Vibrations were a Black band), according to SongFacts.

   Derringer explained: “The idea was to find a band that looked like The Beatles now in ’65 and to redo it as a ‘white’ song, a ‘white’ chart hit. And they found us.”

     Derringer’s band, then called “Rick and the Raiders” played a gig in Dayton, Ohio as the backing band for the Strangeloves, wrote Fred Bronson in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits.  The Strangeloves were signed to Bang Records and had been told to look out on tour for four guys in Beatle haircuts who could make “Sloopy” a hit.

   The next day the two bands drove to New York where Derringer and his band sang over the already recorded “Hang On Sloopy” track.

  “They gave us a small record player and a copy of the musical track and told us exactly what they wanted us to sing,” Derringer said, according to SongFacts. “We went out into the park for a few days, practiced singing it, and put the vocal on. They jumped up and down in the control room and yelled, ‘Number One!’ And a few weeks later, it was.”

   “There are many rumors about the origin of the name ‘Sloopy.’ One popular explanation is that it came from Dorothy Sloop, who was a jazz singer from Steubenville, Ohio,” SongFacts wrote. “Sloop, who died in 1998 at age 85, performed in the New Orleans area using the name ‘Sloopy.’”

   “Derringer blew the lid off of the ‘Sloopy’ story in a 2012 interview with Karen Kernan. Berns, the song’s purported co-writer, once told the guitarist that he wrote the lyric while visiting Cuba, and that ‘sloopy’ was a colloquialism for girls in that country – but that ended up being a tall tale.”

   “According to Derringer, the song was actually written by a ‘high school kid in St. Louis’ who sold it to Berns. Unfortunately, Derringer is as clueless as the rest of us about the unknown girl who inspired it – but she wasn’t from Cuba!”

   “Solomon Burke told Mojo magazine in August 2008 that Berns, who at the time was his designated producer/writer, originally wrote an earlier version of this song for him, but the soul legend turned it down,” SongFacts wrote.

   The Ramsey Lewis Trio took a version of “Hang On Sloopy” to number 11 the same year as the McCoys version. The song has charted three other times, including a version by Derringer as a solo artist in 1975. That version peaked at number 94.

   Sadly, I no longer have that “Down Home in Kansas” shirt. It shrank over the years and I had to get rid of it.  I did meet in Kansas, a cool, talkative woman named Jeannette who agreed to marry me. So the Ohio-to-Kansas move proved to be the right one.

   Still, when “Hang On Sloopy” plays, I am transported about 850 miles east to my boyhood home.