Brown had apparently prepared the song before he was sealed in the box. It was not improvised. He had gone into that crate knowing what he would sing if he survived — what the first words of his freedom would be. This preparation reveals something important about his state of mind going into the journey: he had thought carefully about arrival, had prepared for it, had decided what meaning he would give to the moment if the moment came.
The 40th Psalm was also not an accidental choice. Its central image — being lifted out of a pit, having feet set on solid ground — is one of the most direct possible expressions of the experience Brown had just had, in the most physical and literal sense available. He had been in a pit, in the dark, unable to breathe fully, for twenty-seven hours. He had been lifted out. The correspondence between the psalm and the experience was so exact that the choice of text could almost look contrived — except that it was real, documented by the people present, and the man who chose it had done so before the experience, as a kind of wager with himself about what the outcome would be.
Brown’s choir background at First African Baptist gave him the musical capacity to do what he did. Singing was not a marginal skill in his life; it was a sustained practice, a form of participation in the community that had sustained him. The voice that rose from that office on the morning of March 24 had been trained and used in church for years.