Today’s theme music emerged from my dreamlands. As I stumbled around feeding the scamperbeasts and making coffee, I remembered the little I know about the song

It wasn’t much. An AM radio hit in the mid 1960s, I was troubled by the title. I thought it was “Hang On Snoopy”. When I discovered it was Sloopy, I thought, “Who’s Sloopy?” I knew who Snoopy was. I understood why they were urging Snoopy to hang on, seeing that he slept on his back on top of his dog house and battled the Red Baron, but who was Sloopy that they were telling them to hang on? It made no sense to me.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I discovered that the version of “Hang On Sloopy” by The McCoys came out in 1965, so I was nine. Sloopy is rumored to be Dorothy Sloop, a jazz singer.

All interesting stuff, but surprisingly, the McCoy’s vocalist on the recording is Rick Zehringer. The group performing the music was not his group from Rick and the Raiders, but another group called the Strangeloves. Rick and the Raiders’s name was changed to the McCoys for the release of “Hang On Sloopy”, and Rick Zehringer, who was eighteen when he sang “Hang On Sloopy”, changed his name to Rick Derringer, under which he continues to perform pop, rock, and blues and playing with people and groups from Edgar Winter, Johnny Winter, Barbra Streisand, and Meat Loaf,  to television jingles for Budweiser beer commercials.

That’s a lot of pop history from one song. Anyway, hang on…whoever you are.