Mae Fraley Papers

Mae began teaching early and entertained the troops overseas during WWII in her square dance days. She was involved in the Kentucky Dance Institute (KDI) and Newcamp dance week at Frostburg, Maryland. She led dance groups to workshops and camps in West Virginia and other dance camps in the East as well as led folk dance tours to Europe. She was dance instructor for the Swiss Folklore group, which met in the Swiss embassy in Washington, DC, and took tours to St. Moritz for instruction and performing in 1991 and a yodel fest in 1963. She led an Italian and a German group and was active in the Chevy Chase Community Center folk dance organization. She also attended the Lloyd Shaw Foundation's RMDR. Mae had her own dance camps twice a year: Woodmont in the spring in West Virginia and Pasadena, Maryland in the fall. She also led dance groups to yearly camps in Berkeley Springs, WV and to St. Michaels on the Eastern shore for folk dance weekends. For many years, Mae worked at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, holding a special visitation pass for research in the field of folk dance. Don Armstrong was among the dance leaders who relied on Mae’s research on historic dances. When the Mae Fraley international folk dance collection was added to the Brigham Young University Music and Dance Library, it increased the holdings by more than 276 LPs, 600 45 records, 104 audio tape cassettes, 463 titles of books and pamphlets and some 70 large binders of camp and workshop syllabi. An equally large collection of her American material was donated to the Lloyd Shaw Foundation archives, now housed at the University of Denver Library, Denver, CO." Biography provided from obituary in American Dance Circle Volume 33, number 1 March 2012.