Pusherman

Pusherman was the first song recorded for the soundtrack. Director Gordon Parks Jr. needed a finished song for a nightclub scene in which Mayfield and his band appear, so they recorded it at Bell Sound Studios in New York at night and shot the scene the next day. Tyrone McCullen played drums, the only track on which he did.

Mychal Denzel Smith of Pitchfork heard a percussive melody foreign to pop music. He wrote that Mayfield did not let listeners off the hook, and that in the chorus the pusherman could be a mother, a father, a doctor or a friend. Stevie Chick of the Guardian described the song as casting the dealer as a leech on the community he comes from. In June 2026 CBS News included it in a list of 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.