The Spaghetti Western genre film first sprouted in the 1960s, with the international box office success of Italian director Sergio Leone's Western films—most notably, the Dollars Trilogy, which all starred a young Clint Eastwood.
Ennio Morricone scored each film in the trilogy—A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—and his "Spaghetti Western" scores stand in contrast to those composed for American Westerns in a few major ways. While American Western films often had sizable budgets to work with, spurning large, orchestral scores, Spaghetti Westerns were made with far less money and featured twangy, electric guitar-heavy scores as a result.
The style of music that Morricone wrote to accompany Leone's movies became popular in its own right, going on to influence a variety of artists in other genres of music. But what is specifically about Spaghetti Western music that makes it so cool? Check out the video above to find out.