Songfacts®:

• In the sequel to Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western A Fistful Of Dollars, Clint Eastwood returns as the unnamed stranger who is tasked with hunting down an escaped convict who carries a musical pocket watch.
  
  Once again, the score was composed by Ennio Morricone and its main theme is reminiscent of the lonely whistled melody of the first film. In fact, Leone was so taken with the previous theme, he wanted to use it again for the sequel, but Morricone convinced him to use something new that evoked the same atmospheres. It even used the same performers: Alessandro Alessandroni whistling and Bruno Battisti D'Amario playing electric guitar.
  
  "The musical theme is new, but I kept Alessandro's whistle and D'Amario's electric guitar for the leading parts," Morricone confirmed in his 2019 autobiography. "For the initial choir, which was already present in the previous film, this time I used guttural sounds instead of words, to emphasize an even more radical 'primitivism.' For the same reason, I used the marranzano, an instrument that is typical of the northern African tradition, as well as of Sicily and Korea, played by the exceptional Salvatore Schilliro."
• Morricone used different musical elements to reflect the qualities of the film's characters. In A Fistful Of Dollars, the whistle and flute were used because Eastwood's gunslinger was "fleeting and fast just like the wind." In For A Few Dollars More, he wanted to incorporate the marranzano, which is also known as a Jew's harp, into the theme to signify the rough side of Eastwood's bounty hunting partner, Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef).
• The monotone marranzano was difficult to integrate into the piece. He broke down the process in his autobiography: "The entire film is in D minor, as is the previous, and the part of the Jew's harp included five tones: D, F, G, Bb, and C, the fundamentals of the harmonics I was employing. Given that it is a monotone instrument, capable of producing only one pitch, we had to use five different instruments and record the sounds on separate tracks. Moreover, as we had a very modest three-track tape recorder, it took a lot of tape splicing to obtain a fluid performance. Our sound technician, Pino Mastroianni, fortunately proved to be very patient."
• This was used in the movies Couples Retreat (2009), The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Kick-Ass (2010), and Return Of The Killer Tomatoes! (1988). It was also used on the TV series Eastbound & Down in the 2010 episode "Chapter 11."