The McCoys – Hang On Sloopy

The lead singer was 17 years old when “Hang On Sloopy” hit No. 1 — a band of Midwestern teenagers at the top of the chart in the middle of the British Invasion.

In October 1965, at the height of the British Invasion, the No. 1 song in America belonged to a group of Midwestern high-schoolers. The McCoys’ “Hang On Sloopy” knocked its way to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with a lead singer, Rick Derringer, who was all of seventeen years old. For one week, a garage band from the Ohio-Indiana borderlands sat above the Beatles, the Stones, and the entire wave of British bands then dominating American radio — and the song they did it with would outlive all of their other work combined, eventually becoming the official rock song of an entire state.

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The McCoys almost didn’t record it, and weren’t even really “the McCoys” when they did. Rick Derringer — born Rick Zehringer in Ohio — had been fronting a band called Rick and the Raiders, and in 1965 they were hired as the backing group for the Strangeloves, a trio of New York producers who’d scored with “I Want Candy” while pretending to be Australian sheep farmers. The Strangeloves wanted to release their own version of an old song called “My Girl Sloopy,” first cut by the R&B group the Vibrations in 1964. But when the Dave Clark Five threatened to record it first, the producers made a fast decision: they rushed the teenage Raiders into the studio to sing over the Strangeloves’ existing backing track, retitled the song “Hang On Sloopy,” and — to avoid confusion with Paul Revere and the Raiders — renamed the band the McCoys. Derringer took the stage name that stuck. The whole thing was a scramble, and it produced a No. 1 record.

Who was Sloopy?

The name at the center of it all belonged to a real person. “Sloopy” is widely believed to have been inspired by Dorothy Sloop, a jazz singer born in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1913, who performed around the New Orleans area under the stage name “Sloopy.” She lived to 85, dying in 1998, and for most of her life the song that carried her nickname to No. 1 played on without most listeners having any idea a real woman stood behind it. It’s the kind of small, human fact hiding inside a piece of pure pop — the sort of thing that turns a catchy singalong into a genuine story once you know it.

Ohio’s song, and a guitarist’s long road

“Hang On Sloopy” found its most enduring home not on the radio but on a football field. In the fall of 1965, the Ohio State University Marching Band tried the song at a game, after a student pleaded with the director to give it a shot. The crowd reaction was so strong that the band made it a fixture, and to this day it is played before the fourth quarter of every Ohio State home game. In 1985, the state of Ohio went further and named “Hang On Sloopy” its official rock song. As for Rick Derringer, the teenager at the microphone went on to a long and varied career — his 1973 solo hit “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” years alongside Edgar and Johnny Winter, session work for everyone from Steely Dan to Barbra Streisand, and even producing Weird Al Yankovic’s debut. Derringer died in May 2025 at 77, but the record he made as a seventeen-year-old is still ringing out of stadium speakers every autumn Saturday, as alive as it was the day it hit No. 1.