Once upon a time, when a record label was important and mattered, a good trivia question was, what was the first hit single on the Epic label and the answer is The Witch Queen of New Orleans by Redbone. My favourite thought about Redbone is how their name sounds when you read it backwards. The Witch Queen of New Orleans is obviously a Halloween favourite and was their only UK hit. In the States, it was their second biggest hit, reaching number 21, their biggest came three years later in 1974, made number five and is this week’s suggestion.

Washington-born Bumps Blackwell was a bandleader in the 1940s and two famous people began their career in his band and they were Ray Charles on piano and Quincy Jones on trumpet. In the fifties he took a job as a song writer and arranger with Speciality records which included Little Richard and Sam Cooke among others and also began producing songs for Little Richard, eventually acting as a manager and steering his career into the sixties. He went on to produce many of Sam Cooke’s hits in the sixties too and in the early seventies took Redbone under his wing and guided their career.

Redbone were formed in Los Angeles by two brothers, Pat on vocals and bass guitar and Lolly Vasquez on vocals and guitar, and included another guitarist Tony Bellamy and drummer Peter De Poe. The Vasquez brothers were of Mexican descent and had both previously worked as session musicians on the TV show Shindig. They were also briefly part of the band called The Avantis who, in 1963, recorded the original version of the Bay City Rollers’ debut hit Keep On Dancing. It was Bumps who, in order to avoid discrimination of their heritage, suggested they change their name to Vegas in order for their music to appeal to a white audience. the name Vegas was a play on their stepfather’s name De La Vega and they began playing gigs on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.

Come and Get My Love has a disco beat and 1974 was the dawn of the disco era. Lyrically, it’s a catchy song with the title being repeated 25 times and basically tells the story of a man offering his love to someone who can’t see it. The song opens with the lines ‘Hey what’s the matter with your head, Hey what’s the matter with your mind and your sign and oh, Hey (hey) nothin’ the matter with your head baby, find it, come on and find it’. “We were on a bus in Highwood Boulevard and these girls kept yelling at us ‘come and get your love, come and get your love,” Pat Vegas revealed. “We put it out on the album Wovoka but the track was seven and a half minutes long and the radio stations wouldn’t play it, so I went into the studio at three o’clock in the morning and didn’t get out until one o’clock the next day and I got the track down from seven and half minutes to two minutes 56 seconds.

In the UK, the song has had a couple of resurgences, firstly in the summer of 1995 when the German techno group The Real McCoy covered the song and took it to number 19. In 1994, the song was sampled in Cyndi Lauper’s re-recorded version of Hey Now (Girls Just Want to Have Fun) and has also appeared in the movies The Postman (1997) which starred Kevin Costner, Dick (1999), Grown Ups (2010) and appeared on the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack in 2014. As for television series’ and commercials they are a plenty too. In 2011, it was used as the theme to the American reality television series Big Shrimpin and four years later used again on Netflix for the cartoon series F is for Family. In 2017, the documentary called Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World was released and was the theme to that too. It also featured Pat Vegas in its story. Walmart and Google Pixel are among many global companies who have used it to soundtrack their television commercials, all who would have lined the pockets of the song’s writer Lolly Vegas.

Peter DePoe left the band in 1972 and was briefly replaced by Arturo Perez for 12 months and he was replaced by Butch Rillera who remained until the band split in 1977 and were not heard of until they reformed in 1997. Tony Bellamy died in 2009 and Lolly Vegas the following year. Pat is 83 and is still touring as Redbone. Jimi Hendrix once claimed that Pat Vegas was his favourite guitarist.