Harkstow Grange

Percy Grainger.  Not a name to be picked for the schoolyard football game. He was something of an interesting fellow, an Australian at birth and a winding route that eventually landed him as Dean of Music at NYU. Legend has it that he once elected to walk  about 40 miles to a concert where he was performing so that he would "enter exhausted" as he thought he played best in that state.  No matter what state it was he was successful and well regarded although little known to most non-musicians.  To those of us who grew up playing in bands, he is a bit of an idol as his music is thick, difficult and at sometimes breathtakingly moving. 

This movement, from Lincolnshire Posy, is "Harkstow Grange".  Granges are grain growers collectives  of which Harkstow was one area in Lincolnshire, England.  The folk song's words are adopted from the Aesop's fable of the Miser and His Gold. I won't post them as there is little reason and value but the fable is terrific.

Once upon a time there was a Miser who used to hide his gold at the foot of a tree in his garden; but every week he used to go and dig it up and gloat over his gains. A robber, who had noticed this, went and dug up the gold and decamped with it. When the Miser next came to gloat over his treasures, he found nothing but the empty hole. He tore his hair, and raised such an outcry that all the neighbours came around him, and he told them how he used to come and visit his gold. "Did you ever take any of it out?" asked one of them.

"Nay," said he, "I only came to look at it."
"Then come again and look at the hole," said a neighbour; "it will do you just as much good."
Wealth unused might as well not exist.

Listen here please:

https://youtu.be/G2q8oxHUaMI?si=fPuuTlBp8NsSGcNo