Inside the Dystopian Appalachia Music of the ‘Hunger Games’ Prequel

“I don’t sing when I’m told. I sing when I’ve got something to say,” Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray Baird declares in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. As the film’s title would suggest, music plays a central role in the new Hunger Games prequel, which is set roughly 60 years before the events of the original trilogy.

When she’s selected to participate in the 10th annual Hunger Games, Lucy Gray’s act of defiance is to sing “Nothing You Can Take From Me.” When she—spoiler alert—returns from the arena, she croons a song called “Pure as the Driven Snow.” At another point, Lucy Gray offers the original version of “The Hanging Tree,” a folk song Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss would eventually perform in 2014’s Mockingjay: Part 1.

Readers of Suzanne Collins’s novels will recognize the lyrics to Lucy Gray’s songs, which are largely taken directly from the book. But their melodies were written by executive music producer Dave Cobb. “Luckily, they were crazy enough to hire me,” says Cobb, referring to director Francis Lawrence and producer Nina Jacobson. His songs work in tandem with a film score by James Newton Howard, as well as a soundtrack that features artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Molly Tuttle, who plays Lucy Gray’s guitar in the film.

Though Cobb revisited the existing films, none of them have much in-universe music. He got more guidance through expansive conversations with the filmmakers and with Collins, who he says is “the most brilliant person I’ve ever talked to.”

“When you talk to her, this isn’t in a book—this is a universe she’s created,” he explains. “When she’s telling you about each character in the series, she’s got a backstory behind a backstory, behind a backstory.” Collins told Cobb that her version of dystopian Appalachia was inspired by several sources, including the English Civil War and turn-of-the-century mountain music. “Suzanne is a historian. I’m a history buff,” Cobb continues. “If you talk about the history, I’m in. I can read for days about it. She definitely schooled me, and I went down a deep dive.”

That excavation process also involved a dive into his own personal history. “My granddaddy was a bluegrass musician. I grew up Pentecostal…. My grandmother was a preacher, and she sang like Snow White.” It’s a funny reference, he knows, because Zegler herself plays the princess in Disney’s upcoming Snow White remake—“I think a lot of these songs all harken back to hymnals,” says Cobb, noting that Collins was also well-versed in this genre. “She was a country music DJ at one time, so she knew exactly what she was talking about.”

Though he was guided by the folksy mountain music one would expect from Appalachia, Cobb wasn’t allergic to more unconventional influences as well. “There’s a lot of The Smiths in there,” he reveals. “I figure by the time we got to the future, [the characters] probably heard this stuff. It’s definitely a melting pot. We tried to stick to these very traditional roots, but there’s a lot of curveballs.”

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