Come and Get Your Love — Redbone (1974)

Why this song

The version you know is missing its beginning. That is not a figure of speech: the album cut opens with a slow introduction, and the radio edit cuts it off and drops you straight into the band at full speed.

You have heard it. It is on the cassette the hero carries around in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), and it opened every episode of F Is for Family between 2015 and 2021.

Press play and listen to the first second only. It does not sound like a start. Part of that is the edit, and part of it is where the chords put you.

Historical context

In the 1960s two brothers from Coalinga, California, played surf music in Los Angeles clubs. Pat and Lolly Vegas came from a Yaqui, Shoshone and Mexican family.

The Yaqui are a people of north-western Mexico and southern Arizona, with a music of their own built on gourd rattles and on leg rattles made from dried cocoons.

Their agent told them the world was not ready for a duo of Mexican musicians playing surf. So they billed themselves as the Vegas Brothers and said nothing about where they came from.

Foto: Alejandro Yanes, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

In 1969 they did the opposite. They put together a rock band whose members were all Native or Chicano — Pat on bass, his brother Lolly on guitar and vocals, Tony Bellamy and Peter DePoe — and called it Redbone. In Louisiana, "redbone" is the word for a mixed-race person.

They took the label and put it on the poster. They went on stage in traditional regalia, and the album covers did the same job. According to Pat Vegas, the person who pushed them to form an all-Native rock band was Jimi Hendrix.

The album was recorded between June and October 1973 and came out that November. It is called Wovoka, after the Paiute prophet who founded the Ghost Dance movement in 1889 — the movement that ended in the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.

On that same record Redbone released "We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee", about the massacre and about the occupation of that same place by Native activists a few months earlier. In the United States several stations banned it. In the Netherlands it went to number one.

The one that did get played in America was this one. The single came out on 1 November 1973, entered the chart on 12 January 1974 and reached number five on 13 April. That is why the song is dated 1974 although it was recorded in 1973: 1974 is the year it was heard.

No Native American band had ever climbed that high. And once the hit landed, the trade magazine Broadcasting described it as the band's "most commercially oriented and un-Indian effort". Before any of that, on 22 February 1974, Redbone had played this same song on the television show The Midnight Special, introduced by a traditional dance.

Musical characteristics

It is the same four chords from start to finish, never changing: E minor, A, D, B minor.

That is where the trick is. Home for this song is D major. But D is not at the start of the loop: it is third. Every time round, the music begins away from home, passes through home for a moment and leaves again. So you never hear a "here it starts": there is no point where the music sits down. The chord that acts as home is called the tonic.

The voice does the same thing: it comes in over that first chord, the E minor, without waiting for the D. And the chords themselves are loaded. Chord charts for this song write "D major seventh" and "B minor seventh": each chord gets an extra note that does not belong to it. That extra note is called the seventh, and it is what gives the song its soft 1970s colour, the sound of something that never quite closes.

Then there is the second explanation, which is industrial rather than musical. The album version runs 5:02 and starts slowly. For radio they made a shorter edit, 3:27, that opens with the band already at full speed. That is the one you know: the beginning was literally cut off.

On top of the chords there is a metallic, buzzing sound that is not an ordinary guitar. It is an electric sitar: a guitar with a special bridge that makes the strings buzz like the Indian instrument. Lolly Vegas plays it, and sings.

Underneath there are strings and an electric piano that the band did not play: a studio team added them, with Gene Page handling the orchestration and Joe Sample on piano. Everything added on top of what the band plays is the arrangement.

Foto: Shunichi Kouroki, CC BY 2.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Hard facts: D major, 4/4, 107 beats per minute, 3:27 for the radio version and 5:02 for the album one. The form runs like this: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, verse, intro, chorus. Look at the second to last link: the intro comes back near the end, just before the final chorus.

One warning if you go looking for the chords yourself: some transcriptions write G where this article writes E minor. The two chords share two notes, so in this song you can swap them without anything clashing.

Trivia and curiosities

• It had a different title first. The song circulated as a promo called "Hail", which is the shout that opens the recording. The chorus ate the title.

• The Vegas brothers spent most of the 1960s on stage under a name that hid them. An agent had told them audiences were not ready for two Mexican musicians playing surf, so they became the Vegas Brothers. It took them ten years to put their own story on the poster.

• In 1995 a German Eurodance project, Real McCoy, covered it and took it to number 19 in the United States and to number one on the dance club chart. Same four chords, a completely different decade and a completely different machine playing them.

• It became a hit again forty years later without a single note changing. A 2014 film put it on its hero's cassette, and in 2018 a Christmas advertising campaign took it to number one in French singles sales. The same 1973 recording.

Classroom activities

• Play: the whole loop is E minor, A, D, B minor. On ukulele, E minor and A come out straight away; D and B minor need more fingers, so share them out. The bass only needs the four root notes: E, A, D, B. The drums keep the same pattern the whole way through.

• Analyse: a closed question. Play the loop twice, first starting on E minor, as on the record, and then starting on D. Record both. Which of the two sounds like "this has just started"? Justify your answer by saying where D falls in each one.

• Sing: the chorus repeats the same line over and over, so it takes two minutes to learn by ear. Everyone sings the chorus; leave the verses to a small group. One practical warning: the first note of the melody is a D, and the chord underneath is E minor, which has no D in it. If singers cannot find it, ask whoever is playing the chord to add the seventh — E minor seventh.

• Create: take any four chords and arrange them so that the home chord is third, not first. Play that loop for a minute. It is the procedure of this song without the song.

Key vocabulary

• Tonic — tónica: el acorde que hace de casa
• Seventh — séptima: una nota añadida que no pertenece al acorde
• Electric sitar — sitar eléctrico
• Arrangement — arreglo: lo que se añade encima de lo que toca el grupo
• Form — forma: el orden de las secciones

Resources

In the Year 3 theory and history book — this song works for ¿Cuándo empieza una melodía a decir de dónde eres?, ¿Cómo sabes por dónde vas en una música que oyes por primera vez? and ¿Cómo se guarda algo que solo existe mientras suena?.

Official music video — animated, released in 2020. There was none in 1974.

Ukulele tutorial — TenThumbs Productions. Chord by chord first, then the strumming.

Guitar tutorial — Jason Read. Five minutes, no detours.

Bass tutorial — Matt LaBarber, with the tab on screen.

Drums, the score on screen — COPYDRUM. Not a lesson: the rhythm written out, scrolling with the music. There is no drum lesson for this song worth linking to.

The whole band at once — K-12 Modern Band. Chords on screen for guitar, ukulele, keyboard and bass, with the lyrics underneath.

The album version — 5:02. This is where the slow introduction lives, the one the radio edit removed. Compare it with the opening of the music video.

• Tab — the Songsterr button opens it with the tracks separated out: bass, drums, guitar and electric sitar.