‘The Greatest’ Song “Walk With Kings” Drew From Rudyard Kipling Poem, Marcus Bell Says – Sound & Screen Film

Writing a song to reflect Muhammad Ali could be as daunting a task as any Ali faced in the ring. Marcus “Bellringer” Bell had help, though, he says. For his song “Walk With Kings” from Prime Video‘s The Greatest, he turned to another legend: author Rudyard Kipling.

Bell shared the story at Deadline’s Sound & Screen Film, which made room in its movie-music showcase to spotlight music from the eight-episode series that just landed on the Amazon streamer.

“It started when I was 9 years old,” Bell said. “There was a woman named Ms. Noble that lived across the street from where I grew up in Virginia. Ms. Noble was the neighborhood grandmother. She’d call my mom, ‘I got a pound cake. Can Marcus come over?’ That kind of woman. She gave me, for my ninth birthday, a poem called If.”

Bell later learned that Ali himself referred to If, written by Nobel-winning Jungle Book author Kipling, as his favorite poem. If reads, “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings nor lose the common touch… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And which is more you’ll be a Man, my son!”

“I read the poem and I could see myself in the poem,” Bell continued. “I could see something more to aspire to as well. So I wrote a song from that experience for those people in underrepresented communities that aspire for greatness.”

Inspiration came from Bell’s own family, too.

“It was a spiritual journey,” Bell said. “My mother was a national tennis champion in the ‘60s and played in the U.S. Open. She was a civil rights activist. Caroline Williams, she was like the first Williams. [In] ’61, she was the national tennis champion. That was the year that Ali won the gold medal. So tennis was her activism and boxing was Muhammad Ali’s activism. And that piano over there and my pen, my activism.”

The Greatest builds to Ali’s fight against Sonny Liston. When Bell heard his song in the context of the episode in which it plays, he was further moved.

“I saw it play with the picture, I got a chill,” Bell said. “I started crying. And so since I then watched the show myself when it came out and understand the context, it’s such a key moment. It’s the transition. I was sharing this with the orchestra earlier. It’s the transition moment where he becomes the greatest. It’s the moment that he steps into himself in a different way.”

Watch the conversation in the video above.