The song that accompanies the opening of Django Unchained comes from Sergio Corbucci's Django. Luis Bacalov wrote the music and Rocky Roberts performs the vocal: the attribution to Roberto Fia does not apply to this recording.
A 1966 voice in a 2012 film
The opening credits of Django Unchained bring back the main theme from the western Django, directed by Sergio Corbucci and released in 1966. Luis Bacalov's music and Rocky Roberts' vocal performance establish an audible link before the new protagonist can tell his story. The shared title ceases to be a written reference and becomes a musical presence that occupies the beginning of the film.
Identifying the voice matters because the song is not a new performance made for Tarantino. Its power comes in part from the recognition of an earlier recording, with its character and the way it presents the hero. Attributing it to Roberto Fia would muddle the credits and erase Roberts' contribution. The film uses an existing piece within a selection that also includes new compositions and music borrowed from other films.
The melody has a dramatic breadth that contrasts with the vulnerability of the chained men. The name Django is given the treatment of a legendary hero while the image shows subjugation and forced displacement. That distance is productive: the protagonist does not yet have the freedom the song seems to promise him. The music anticipates a dimension of the character that the action must build over the course of the story.
The opening does not therefore turn the film into a literal continuation of Corbucci's western. The stories, the characters and their circumstances are different. The borrowing establishes a cinematic lineage and an expectation of tone. The audience may recognise it or hear the theme for the first time; in either case, the song organises a solemn, emphatic entry into a world of violence, travel and transformation.
The hero's name and the image of the captive
The repeated use of the name in the vocal performance helps single Django out within the group moving under guard. The film begins by showing a shared condition, but its title and music announce that a particular trajectory will follow. That tension between collective and individual accompanies the story's project: building a western hero out of someone the system portrayed treats as an interchangeable possession.
Images of marked bodies and chains prevent the musical grandeur from turning the opening situation into a comfortable adventure. The song does not erase the pain we see. It places it within a narrative promise that has not yet been fulfilled. The viewer can at the same time perceive the harshness of the present and the possibility that this man may come to occupy the centre of a story told with the resources of popular cinema.
This relationship between music and image does not need to be read as a documentary statement about what Django thinks. The theme does not come from an instrument present in the scene, nor is it heard by the captives. It operates in the space of cinematic narration, directed at the audience. Its voice provides an external dimension to the character's visible experience, without replacing his later decisions or speaking literally in his name.
The temporal start also matters: the song appears when we still know little about Django and Schultz. It does not comment on a victory already achieved. It offers an emotional frame before the alliance that will make change possible is established. When the film leaves that opening and enters the dialogue of the night-time encounter, the scale shrinks: from musical invocation we move to the concrete negotiation that will alter the protagonist's life.
Bacalov as part of a memory of the western
The presence of Luis Bacalov does not end with the opening theme. The musical selection recovers other pieces of his, including Lo chiamavano King and La corsa. Each arrives with a different origin and a different function. Recognising that diversity avoids talking about a single old soundtrack transferred wholesale into the new film. Tarantino selects fragments from a tradition and distributes them according to the needs of his scenes.
The link with Sergio Corbucci is better understood as a dialogue between films than as a duty to repeat its plot. The song retains a recognisable identity, while the images change the story of the name it utters. The result allows a musical memory associated with an Italian gunman to now accompany a Black protagonist who is trying to win his freedom and recover his wife in the slaveholding American South.
This shift alters the reading without requiring the viewer to know the original. Anyone who recognises the reference can attend to the continuities and differences; anyone who does not still receives a song strong enough to sustain the sequence. The choice works on two levels at once: as an immediate experience and as a link to a history of the genre. Neither needs to cancel the other for the opening to be effective.
The theme's main contribution is therefore to make a possibility of heroism audible before the protagonist can exercise it. Roberts' voice, Bacalov's composition and the image of the captives do not fit together peacefully: they produce a friction that pushes the gaze towards the future. The name already sounds like a legend, but the film begins by showing how far the man still is from possessing his own life.
More context in the Django Unchained guide.