A closer look at the theme music from John Ford's "The Searchers"

"The Searchers" starts with four dramatic pieces of music, each distinct and loaded with information. The first piece of music starts as a dramatic fanfare, traditional of the indian sound. After this short attention-getter which establishes the notion that the film may have something to do with indians, we hear the uplifting sound of strings. A sound that you would expect to hear out of a traditional western.  From hearing this theme music, we don't need to see any of the film to know that the film deals with the battle between man and indian. Theme music is powerful in that way. We almost know what's going to happen before it happens. 


After the first piece, we hear an acoustic guitar and a sung ballad. This piece of music is it's own originally composed theme song. It was common for a movie of that era to have it's own theme music. 

The words in this song are spot on in describing the ways of the homeric hero "what makes a man to wander? what makes a man to roam?"

The third musical theme starts "as the white lettering disappears, we realize that the blackness is the dark interior of a house. Its door opens onto the spectacle of a harsh but breath-taking western landscape, and as it does, a solo guitar segues into a string rendition of the gentle, haunting tune “Lorena”—the biggest hit of 1856, and a song still known and honored a century later, when The Searchers was released. A plaintive lament to a lost love, “Lorena” became one of the key songs of the Civil War era, and was especially popular with the soldiers of the Confederacy, with whom it was most associated" (Cumbow).

The fourth and final theme we hear is "Bonnie Blue Flag," which is played in a "melancholic, dirge-like tempo. The war is not only over, it is lost, and this man regrets it—is, in fact, filled with regret" (Cumbow) and then we hear the first words spoken in the film.

Works Cited

Cumbow, Robert C. "“Somebody’s Fiddle”: Traditional Music in “The Searchers”." Rev. of The Searchers. Web log post. Parallax-View. 13 Dec. 2009. Web. 7 Nov. 2011. <http://parallax-view.org/2009/12/13/somebody’s-fiddle-traditional-music-in-the-searchers/>.