Their chart history was short, but Redbone are remembered for their funky, chugging brand of “swamp rock” (shorthand for sounds associated with Louisiana), and also for the Native American regalia they’d wear on stage. All of the members had roots in multiple nations, with band leaders Pat and Lolly Vazquez coming from Shoshone, Yaqui, and Papago (alongside Chicano) bloodlines. The brothers changed their last name to Vegas after relocating from Fresno to Los Angeles, where they played in the Shindig house band, appeared in the 1967 film It’s a Bikini World, released an album called Pat and Lolly Vegas at the Haunted House (1966), and rubbed shoulders with scenesters like Jimi Hendrix, who encouraged them to embrace their heritage.
Like fellow California rock ‘n’ rollers Creedence Clearwater Revival, the brothers also had a fixation on Cajun culture. Their friend Jim Ford, a New Orleans native who’d moved to L.A., helped them write a song called “Niki Hoeky” in 1967, which was full of inspired, lyrical nonsense with linguistic believability. P.J. Proby and Bobbie Gentry, among others, recorded versions of it, and the brothers would incorporate Cajun flavors into their next project. They called it Redbone, a Cajun slang term they’d come across referring to mixed-race ancestry, and their 1970 self-titled debut album (a two-record set) included a track called “Crazy Cajun Cakewalk” (the leadoff track), their own version of “Niki Hoeky,” and “Danse Calinda,” a term borrowed from an exotic track on Dr. John’s Gris-Gris (1968) album.
Before 1970 was done, they released a follow-up album called Potlatch (a Chinook term for a kind of feast), which amped up their Native American associations. It depicted them in headbands, framed by indigenous embroidery, and included songs with powwow chants, rhythms, and topics. Their song “Alcatraz” paid tribute to the takeover by Indians of All Tribes (IOAT) that would last until the following summer. “Maggie,” though, evoked “Niki Hoeky” with more Cajun-sounding mystery phrases as they sung about an ill-fated enchantress. It also showcased the signature sound of Lolly Vegas’s guitar running through a rotating Leslie speaker, normally the vehicle of a Hammond organ.
Their 1971 Message from a Drum album had a striking cover with open sky, horses, and tepees, and I wish I could figure out its origins. It’s credited to Ed Lee, the house designer at Epic, but I’m guessing he didn’t actually paint it. This is the album that includes Redbone’s first Top 40 hit, “The Witch Queen of New Orleans,” in which they sharpen the focus on their “Niki Hoeky” and “Maggie” stories and find a true historical figure in Marie Laveau, the 19th century voodoo queen of New Orleans legend. Other than a 1954 “Minnie the Moocher”-type track by Papa Celestin, the famous witch hadn’t appeared in much popular music other than an instrumental by Canned Heat, before Redbone got to her. “Marie, Marie, La-voodoo-veau,” they chanted over menacing bowed guitars, casting spells of their own. What to make of this early seventies “season of the witch” (using Donovan’s words from a few years earlier)? Santana had a hit with “Black Magic Woman” in 1970, the German group the Rattlers charted with “The Witch,” and Doctor Hook and Bobby Bare would both record versions of Shel Silverstein’s “Marie LaVeau,” with Bare’s making the charts. And then came Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon.”
Redbone's next album, Already Here (1972) presented the band’s faces lined up behind a spiritual leader figure on the cover, while the back showed them in war paint, and it included one last overtly Cajun track called “Fais-Do.” The next album came out ithe following year and took the name of Wovoka, the Ghost Dance movement leader who had inspired the occupation at Wounded Knee earlier in 1973. The album was supposed to contain a song called “We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee,” but Epic refused to include it on the album, prompting Redbone to press their own singles. They hauled them along on their European tour, and sent it to the top of the Dutch and Belgian charts.
The big story of Wovoka, of course, was “Come and Get Your Love,” the joyous single that reached number 5 in the U.S. in 1974 and has become a media usage staple. It retains symbolic significance in the story of early seventies formatting in the sense that it drew the curtains, with smiles and reassurance, on an entity that had been decidedly activist and musically diverse up to then.
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