A Birthday Poem Became the Heart of "Walk With Kings"

Marcus "Bellringer" Bell says a birthday present at age nine set him on the road to writing "Walk With Kings", the song in Prime Video's The Greatest. The series is an eight-episode drama about boxer Muhammad Ali, and Bell wrote the song for it.

Bell talked about the track at Deadline's Sound & Screen Film event. Deadline reported his account of where it came from. He said that when he turned nine, his neighbour Ms. Noble in Virginia gave him Rudyard Kipling's poem "If". Bell said Ali called "If" his favourite poem.

The song takes its inspiration from that poem. Kipling's lines include "Or walk with Kings nor lose the common touch", and that phrase is the one Bell kept coming back to. He said he wrote the song from his own experience with the poem, aimed at people in underrepresented communities who want to achieve greatness.

His family history also runs through it. Bell said his mother, Caroline Williams, was a national tennis champion in the 1960s, played in the U.S. Open and worked as a civil rights activist.

In the series, the story builds toward Ali's fight against Sonny Liston. Bell described the song's place in the show as the moment Ali becomes the greatest. He said hearing "Walk With Kings" played over the picture gave him chills and made him cry.

The series is listed by Amazon MGM Studios as an Original series with a launch date of 4 November 2026. Bell has also released "Walk With Kings" as a standalone single, announcing on Facebook that it would drop on 4 November.

For viewers, the song is a way into the show's emotional turn. For Bell, it is a line from a birthday gift that he has carried for most of his life.