Mary Barnicle Cadle, ca. 1891-1978

Mary Elizabeth (Barnicle) Cadle, college professor and folklore expert, was born in about 1891 in Natick, Mass., of Irish parents. The family moved to Providence, R.I., and MEBC attended Brown University, where as a student she was a member of the suffrage movement. She received her A.M. from Bryn Mawr College in medieval English literature.

MEBC taught English and Folklore first at the University of Minnesota and later at Connecticut College, Antioch College, and New York University. In 1941 she married Tillman Cadle, a union organizer of miners. Her home in Greenwich Village was a center of the folk music revival of the 1930s and 1940s and her friends included Leadbelly, Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, Sarah Ogan, Gunning, Jean Ritchie, and Pete Seeger. From 1937 to 1949 the Cadles travelled around eastern Tennessee and Kentucky recording folk songs, love songs, bawdy ballads, and work songs. While MEBC was on the faculty of the University of Tennessee in 1949, part of her collection of 900-1000 recordings was stolen. The remaining recordings (approximately 550) are now housed in the Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. In 1986, the Library of Congress recognized It's Just the Same Today: The Barnicle-Cadle Field Recordings from Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, 1938-1949 as one of the best recordings in the field of folklore. MEBC died in October 1978.