There are movie openings that people talk about for years. Not because of an explosion or a twist, but because of a feeling — a single song that arrives at exactly the right moment and makes an entire audience smile before the story has even begun.

This particular opening used a warm, rolling groove that had been sitting quietly in the 1970s for decades, waiting for a new crowd to find it.

The song is “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone.

The Opening Scene a New Generation Remembered

When Guardians of the Galaxy opened in the summer of 2014, audiences were not quite sure what they were about to see. Marvel had made blockbusters before, but this one was different — stranger, funnier, and set in a corner of the universe most moviegoers had never visited. The studio was taking a risk on a talking raccoon, a walking tree, and a wisecracking space thief with a beat-up Walkman.

What director James Gunn understood was that the right music could set the entire tone in under a minute. As the opening scene unfolded — Peter Quill, soon to be Star-Lord, dancing and singing his way through an alien planet while on a mission — “Come and Get Your Love” carried the whole sequence. The groove was so effortless, so immediately likable, that audiences laughed and leaned in at the same time.

For younger viewers in that theater, it was a discovery. For older viewers, it was something else entirely — a warm flash of recognition, a song they had heard on the radio in a completely different chapter of their lives suddenly playing on a giant screen in front of an audience that had no idea what had just been handed to them.

The Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack — officially titled Awesome Mix Vol. 1 — became one of the most talked-about soundtrack albums in years. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in 2014, a rare achievement for a collection of older songs. And at the center of that conversation, right at the start, was Redbone.

Redbone Before the Movie Revival

Long before a Marvel film brought them to a new generation, Redbone had already written themselves into American music history — on their own terms, in their own way.

Formed in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Redbone was led by brothers Pat and Lolly Vegas, along with drummer Peter DePoe and bassist Tony Bellamy. The band was proudly rooted in their Native American heritage — Yaqui, Shoshone, and other tribal ancestry — and they carried that identity throughout their music and presentation at a time when the music industry rarely made space for it. The name Redbone itself came from a Southern slang term, reclaimed and worn with pride.

Their sound was something specific and hard to copy. It pulled from funk, rock, blues, and the earthy rhythms of the American Southwest. It had warmth without being soft, and a forward motion without being aggressive. When Redbone was firing on all cylinders, the music felt both rooted and free.

“Come and Get Your Love” was released in 1974 and became the band’s biggest commercial hit, climbing into the top five on the Billboard Hot 100. It appeared on their album Wovoka, named after the Paiute spiritual leader who inspired the Ghost Dance movement of the late 19th century — a reminder that even their biggest pop moment existed inside a larger, more meaningful story the band was always telling.

The song’s success in 1974 was real, but like a lot of music from that era, it gradually faded from the front of people’s minds over the following decades, living on in oldies radio rotations and the memory of listeners who had been there the first time.

The Groove That Never Needed Updating

What makes “Come and Get Your Love” so immediately likable is that it does not try too hard. The opening riff arrives with confidence and ease, the rhythm section locks in behind it, and the whole thing just moves. There is a looseness to it that feels impossible to manufacture — the kind of feel that musicians talk about when they describe a session where everything clicked.

Lolly Vegas’s vocal performance is central to that feeling. His voice is relaxed and assured, never overselling a single word. The call-and-response structure gives the song a communal quality, as if everyone in the room is already in on the same good mood. The production is clean without being cold, and the arrangement leaves just enough space for the groove to breathe.

Decades passed, and the song did not need to change to remain appealing. When music supervisors and filmmakers began looking for tracks that could carry emotional weight without irony, “Come and Get Your Love” was exactly the kind of song that held up — warm, propulsive, and completely sincere.

James Gunn has spoken about the care he put into curating the Guardians soundtrack, and “Come and Get Your Love” was not a random choice. It needed to introduce a character who was fundamentally joyful even in the middle of chaos — someone the audience could root for immediately. The song did that work in seconds.

Why the Song Felt Perfect on Screen

There is a specific kind of song that works in a film opening, and it is not always the most obvious choice. It has to do something more than just sound good. It has to communicate a feeling about the character before the character has spoken a word.

“Come and Get Your Love” did exactly that. The song is irresistibly good-natured. It suggests movement, lightness, and a kind of confidence that does not take itself too seriously. When audiences watched Peter Quill dance through that alien landscape, the song made it feel natural rather than strange. The humor landed because the music earned it.

There was also something generationally layered about the moment. Older audience members who recognized the song understood something younger viewers would only learn later — that this music had a real life before the movie, that it came from a real band with a real story, that the Walkman in Peter Quill’s pocket was a stand-in for genuine musical memory and not just a prop.

The film made the song famous again, but Redbone had made it great the first time. That distinction matters, and the best result of the revival was that it sent curious listeners backward — to the full recording, to the Wovoka album, to the broader catalog of a band that had been doing remarkable work long before a movie came along to say so.

A Classic Shared Across Generations

Some songs belong to a moment. They capture a specific year, a specific mood, a specific fashion, and when that era passes, they pass with it. Those songs are perfectly fine. They do exactly what they were meant to do.

But other songs belong to something less defined. They arrive with an energy that does not expire, a feel that does not date, a sincerity that does not go out of style. “Come and Get Your Love” is one of those songs.

For the listeners who first heard it on AM radio in 1974, it is connected to a specific texture of memory — windows down, summer heat, the feeling of a particular stretch of American road. For the listeners who heard it for the first time in a darkened theater in 2014, it arrived as something unexpectedly fresh, a groove from a world they hadn’t discovered yet.

Redbone deserves to be remembered for more than a movie opening, as wonderful as that opening was. They were a band with deep roots, a distinctive voice, and a career that represented something meaningful in American music — a Native American group who reached the top of the charts on their own terms, with their own sound, without sanding down what made them different.

“Come and Get Your Love” is the song most people know. But behind it is a band worth knowing more fully. If the movie sent even a fraction of its massive audience back to the original recording, back to the album, back to the story of Pat and Lolly Vegas and the group they built, then the revival did something genuinely good.

Some songs find their audience once. The lucky ones find it twice. And every so often, a song earns both moments completely — arriving fresh in 1974 and arriving fresh again forty years later, because the groove was always that good.