November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.
This will register as an appalling fact to some: the Redbone tune “Come and Get Your Love” was released 50 years ago this year. The thing is an earworm — it dominated airwaves in its own time, and was a staple of AM radio for years after that. It came roaring back into my consciousness in recent months when it was used in the 2014 Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy, which I first watched in 2020, and as the theme of a whole episode of Reservation Dogs in 2021. (I love that show, btw, and will soon be posting about it).
The revival of the tune, prompted me to research it and only then did I learn, after nearly a half century, that the band which performed it, Redbone, was composed of Native Americans. They are no relation to Leon Redbone, btw. The word is Cajun slang for a person of mixed ancestry. The band’s two primary members Patrick and Candido Vasquez-Vegas, better known as Pat and Lolly Vegas, are of Yaqui, Shoshone, and Mexican ancestry. Pat won a nationwide singing contest sponsored by Coca Cola at age 17, which led to opportunities to performing with Lolly as the Vegas Brothers. In 1965 they released the LP Pat & Lolly Vegas at the Haunted House, accompanied by appearances on tv shows like Shindig!, Hollywood a Go Go, and Where the Action Is. In 1967 a song they cowrote “Niki Hoeky” became a top 40 hit for P.J. Proby. It was sung by Bobbie Gentry on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour the following year.
In 1970, the brothers were joined by Peter DePoe a.k.a Last Walking Bear, inventor of the “King Kong” style of drumming (and a former bandmate of Jimi Hendrix) and part Southern Cheyenne, Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and Rogue River/Siletz, as well as Tony Bellamy (Yaqui and Mexican) to form Redbone. Their 1971 single “The Witch Queen of New Orleans” (about Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau) went to #21 on the charts. Some of their other tunes, like “We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee” (1973), and “Wovoka” (1974), about the creator of the Ghost Dance, were hits in other countrues.
But “Come and get Your Love” went all the way to #5, and stayed in the top 40 for 18 weeks. During this hot period in 1974 Redbone appeared on The Midnight Special, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and American Bandstand. There are clips of some of these performances on youtube and I highly recommend checking them out. The whole visual effect, with the Native American costumes, completely enhances the experience, and rejiggers the way you hear the song. Seeing them in the costumes in fact reminds me of other themed bands like Paul Revere and the Raiders, who of course had a hit with “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)”, the success of which seems relevant to Redbone’s own moment in the sun.
For more about show business history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.