Tag: West Virginia Radio presents

Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes Launch on Thursday Night

Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes is the story of women in the ultimate Man’s World – the labs and Shuttle crew cabins of NASA. 

Catch the broadcast Thursday March 12 at 9 pm.

Told in the first person, these stories explore the experiences of NASA’s first woman engineers and scientists and its first astronauts.  It also tells the fascinating story of a group of women pilots who – in the early 1960s – were led to believe that they would be America’s first women astronauts and were given the exact same physical tests are the Mercury astronauts. 

The program is narrated by Eileen Collins, the first woman commander of a Space Shuttle

Jazzy Women Take the Stage

In the 1960s, as the civil-rights movement and other cultural changes gained momentum, a generation of women artists made their way through a jazz world that had long been less than hospitable to their aims. 

This special program will air Thursday night, March 5 at 9 pm.

Singers such as Nina Simone and Jeanne Lee, composer Carla Bley, organist Shirley Scott, harpist Dorothy Ashby and fellow harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane, and trumpeter Barbara Donald all left behind notable recordings from this decade as they expanded the role of women in jazz in ways both traditional and groundbreaking. 

“Jazz Women of the 1960s” offers a musical survey of these artists, including Nina Simone’s civil-rights anthem “Young, Gifted and Black,” Alice Coltrane’s Eastern-religion-inspired “Huntington Ashram Monastery,” Jeanne Lee’s take on an Ellington classic, and an early interpretation of Carla Bley’s jazz standard “Ida Lupino.”

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