"Hide Away" is not in itself a borrowing from Methodist Pie. It just uses a verse from the latter as a "floater."

"Hide Away" as sung by Oscar Ford is "De Gospel Raft," words by Frank Dumont, which probably dates to the 1880s. It appears in the Oliver Ditson-published "Minstrel Songs Old and New", which though it carries no date, was first published in 1889.

The misunderstanding is natural enough, since the verse Ford uses isn't part of the original song--like so many oldtime singers, who had to fill a 3- to 3 1/2-minute record, he just snatched the Methodist Pie verse out of the air to fill out the side.

But that implies Oscar Ford knew "Methodist Pie" probably before Brad Kincaid recorded it. (Though he just may have seen the printed version, my guess is that it was an old song for him then, or he wouldn't have used the verse so casually.)

The Randolph versions cited are from the 1940s and are incomplete... probably the two informants were singing from memory of the Kincaid recording.

The jury is still out on how old "Methodist Pie" is or who wrote it, but it sounds to me like an imitation of a late-period (c. 1890-1910) minstrel-style song before the minstrel shows began to fade forever. Minstrel songs at the end of their popularity did increasingly tend to lean into the territory contemporaneously opened up by "Negro spirituals" as they were called.

The camp-meeting craze, which this song satirizes, was also an 1880s development, if memory serves--one of those periodic fads for ecstatic religion that (thankfully, IMHO) don't last forever. It did persist into the early 20th century, so was available for fun-poking at any time from say 1890 until 1928, when, as far as we know to date, "Methodist Pie" first appeared.