husbandman

He performed with the Graham company until 1958, the year he appeared opposite Graham as the Husbandman in Nathan Kroll’s film of what is widely considered her most beloved work, “Appalachian Spring,” set to the music of Aaron Copland.

“My friend John, when the corn is grown, even before it has ripened—while the milk of its mother-earth is in him, and the sunshine has not yet begun to paint him with his gold, the husbandman he pull the ear and rub him between his rough hands, and blow away the green chaff, and say to you: ‘Look! he’s good corn; he will make good crop when the time comes.’

How is it that a husbandman and a seamstress follow a similar occupation?

He is not just a husbandman of organically raised animals and crops — he has, he says, affection for animals, for place, for “everything” — but a tragic, muck-stained poet as well.

The duet for Husbandman and Bride from “Appalachian Spring” is the sweetest and most polite section of that great work: Out of context, it gives a misleadingly conventional impression.