Aaron Copland had the idea of composing an opera for a long time, and we had often discussed my writing the libretto for it. But as to any specific theme, or time, or locale, nothing seemed to materialise. I knew he felt, more or less, that opera was uncharted territory for him. “All those notes,” he would say, “and that awful bugaboo, dialogue.” Then one day he played me several musical sketches he kept in his note-book and with these showed James Agee's book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The photographs in this book related to the music he had played—photos of a sharecropper's family in the south. I knew that this was a signpost showing the direction in which he wanted to go, and an important one for me as librettist, for now, I had my point of departure for The Tender Land.