Songfacts®:

• This is the main theme to Quentin Tarantino's western movie Django Unchained. Luis Bacalov originally composed the song for the 1966 Italian spaghetti Western film Django. The Argentina-born naturalised Italian composer won an Academy Award for Original Score - music adaptation or treatment - in 1996 for Il Postino.
• Miami-born Charlie 'Rocky' Roberts was a welterweight boxing champion in four states at a young age, but a serious eye injury ended his fledgling career, and he decided to enlist in the Navy at the age of seventeen. During his time on the aircraft carrier USS Independence drummer Doug Fowlkes heard Rocky sing and convinced him to join his group Doug Fowlkes and the Airedales. They later became Rocky Roberts & The Airedales and achieved some success in France. In the second half of the sixties Rocky moved to Italy where as a solo artist he had a big hit with "Stassero Mi Butto" as well as guesting on numerous TV music shows. He continued to forge a career performing energetic Italian language versions of Motown and Atlantic soul hits well into the 1970s.
• Speaking on a Sirius XM satellite radio special, Quentin Tarantino Unleashed, that aired December 14, 2012 on Little Steven's Underground Garage show, the director said with a chuckle that Rocky Roberts sings this song "in quasi-Elvis style." "I've always loved this song," he added. "I think it's fantastic. Not only that, 'Django' was so popular around the world, I've heard Japanese versions of the song, Italian versions of the song, I've heard Greek versions of this song, because it was played all over..."
  "I have to say," he continued, "when I came up with the idea to do Django Unchained, I knew it was imperative that I open it with this song as a big opening credit sequence. Because basically this movie is done in the style of a spaghetti western, and any spaghetti western worth its salt has a big opening credit sequence. In fact, if it doesn't, I don't really want to see it."