Given Bradley Kincaid's 1895 birth date, it seems highly unlikely that he wrote "Bury Me Beneath the Willow," since he was only 14 when it appeared in Belden's collection, already in tradition.

But Mother Maybelle Carter could still be on to something. Kincaid may well have collected the song. To stoke his repertoire for his radio shows, Bradley would circulate in the mountains, particularly in his native Kentucky, looking for old songs. In doing so, he may have been among the earliest to find a version of it, to popularize it on the radio and publish it in one of his song folios. Thus he could have been the primary person to spread the song on early media.

Kincaid's folios are a valuable source of many early versions of traditional songs, along with some composed ones like Put My Little Shoes Away. Bury Me Beneath the Willow would thus have been a song he collected, not one he wrote. The folios in particular confused many people, who were used to thinking of songs in folios as being written by the singer unless specified otherwise.

That may be the source of Maybelle's remark. Bob