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 vocals: the attribution to Roberto Fia does not correspond 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's 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 introduces the hero. Attributing it to Roberto Fia would confuse the credits and erase Roberts's 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 treated like that of a legendary hero while the image shows subjugation and forced displacement. That distance is productive: the protagonist still does not have the freedom the song seems to promise him. The music foreshadows a dimension of the character that the action will have to 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 a sense of tone. The audience may recognize it or hear the theme for the first time; in either case, the song organizes 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 individualize Django 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 the collective and the individual accompanies the project of the story: to build a western hero out of someone whom the system represented treats as an interchangeable possession.
The images of marked bodies and chains keep 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 perceive at the same time the harshness of the present and the possibility that this man will come to occupy the center of a story told with the tools 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, addressed to the audience. Its voice provides an exterior dimension to the visible experience of the character, without replacing his later decisions or speaking literally in his name.
The temporal beginning also matters: the song appears when we still know little about Django and Schultz. It does not comment on a victory already won. 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 nighttime 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 western memory
The presence of Luis Bacalov does not end with the opening theme. The musical selection brings back other pieces by him, including Lo chiamavano King and La corsa. Each arrives with a different origin and function. Recognizing that diversity keeps us from speaking of a single old soundtrack moved over intact into the new film. Tarantino selects fragments of 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 an obligation to repeat his plot. The song preserves a recognizable identity while the images change the story of the name it speaks. The result allows a musical memory associated with an Italian gunfighter to now accompany a Black protagonist who is trying to free himself and recover his wife in the slaveholding American South.
That shift alters the reading without requiring the viewer to know the original. Those who recognize the reference can pay attention to the continuities and differences; those who do not are given a song with enough force to carry the sequence. The choice works on two simultaneous levels: as an immediate experience and as a connection to a history of the genre. Neither needs to cancel the other for the opening to be effective.
The theme's main contribution, then, is to make a possibility of heroism audible before the protagonist can exercise it. Roberts's voice, Bacalov's composition, and the image of the captives do not align calmly: they create a friction that pushes the gaze toward the future. The name already sounds like a legend, but the film begins by showing how far the man still has to go before he can have his own life.
More context in the Django Unchained guide.