This year Radioinfo will take you back 50 years to the songs from 1974. It was a mighty fine year for music.

An earworm of the best kind. I had no idea how far Come and Get Your Love had reached until last weekend, driving to see Troy Cassar-Daley, it came on my Spotify playlist as we arrived at our destination and the youngest of our concert going group, aged 13, wouldn’t get out until the song was finished.

Then we listened again on the way home.

Like last week’s Hooked on a Feeling, Come and Get Your Love’s revival can also be attributed to the Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy, and Peter Quinn’s mixtape made by his mum.

Redbone were made up of brothers Pat and Lolly Vegas and other members of Native American and Mexican American descent. The word Redbone is Cajun for a person of mixed-race descent. The brothers only decided to form an actual band around themselves at the recommendation of Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix considered Lolly to be one of his favourite guitarists. High praise indeed.

In Australia, Come and Get Your Love never charted. I’m not sure that it was ever released as a single here. They did chart, in 1972, with Witch Queen of New Orleans, which was a bigger hit here (and in the UK where it made No 2) than in the US. It returned to the top 10 in 1987 when Australian girl group The Chantoozies covered it, hoping for the same kind of revival success as Bananarama had had doing Shocking Blue’s Venus.

Come and Get Your Love was the only single released in the US from Redbone’s fourth album called Wovoka. In Europe though the album included the song We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee addressing both the massacre of Sioux Indians in 1890 and the recent protests by Oglala Lakota people who, for symbolic reasons, had seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee in South Dakota. It was kept from the album and withheld from release in the US, with stations banned from playing it.

Redbone and its members were later inducted into the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian for being the first group of Native American ancestry to have a No 1 single. I’ve included in tribute this incredible live performance of the band, from Feb 1974, on The Midnight Special.

For me, I always connect this song with family and good times. The below is a French Christmas commercial from 2018, using this song. It is one of my all time favourite ads, and evocative of again just how cross generational Come and Get Your Love is and will always be.

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and music trivia buff for Radioinfo.