Tuesday June 14, 2022 “Come and Get Your Love” Redbone (Copy)
Today’s song opens with one of the most distinctive bass lines ever. It also has a driving drum beat that the band referred to as the “King Kong Beat’.
Redbone, a Cajun term for a mixed-race person, which the band adopted to signify their mixed ancestry, was a Native American band from Coalinga, California, led by the brothers Pat and Candido ("Lolly") Vasquez. The Vasquez brothers were of Yaqui, Shoshone, and Mexican heritage.
“Come and Get Your Love” was a top five hit for Redbone and would stay on the charts a remarkable eighteen weeks and was the fourth most popular song on the year end charts in 1974. It would also be featured prominently in the 2014 movie Guardians of the Galaxy as one of the songs on a mixtape made for the movie's protagonist Peter Quill.
Redbone was managed by Bumps Blackwell, who guided Little Richard and Sam Cooke to success. The band earned an audience playing clubs on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and were contemporaries of The Doors in that club scene. At the same time they were doing studio work with artists like Tina Turner, Sonny & Cher, James Brown, Little Richard, and Elvis.
Redbone’s follow-up single "We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee" was a song that recalled the massacre of Lakota Sioux at the hands of the US 7th Cavalry Regiment. It charted in several European countries and even reached number one in some countries but did not chart in the US where it was initially withheld from release due to lyrical controversy and then banned by several radio stations due to its confrontation of a sore subject.
A few years later that battle would be reversed at the Little Big Horn when that same 7th Regiment now led by George Custer would be decimated by the combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes.
Stay safe and well…and “Come and Get Your Love” is one of those songs that will be bouncing around in your head the rest of the day…in a really happy way. Enjoy it.