‍   In 2009, I produced Marching Songs of the WASP  with the help of my niece and her sisters from Kappa Kappa Gamma at Baylor University. Baylor Film & Digital Media generously loaned us their recording studio.

‍

‍    I wanted to capture the energy of young women singing as they marched. I didn't want the recordings to sound perfect—I wanted them to sound real. The goal was to record the songs a cappella, just as the WASP would have sung them. We surrounded the studio with posters from our traveling exhibit, and Mom gave a short presentation explaining who the WASP were and why preserving their story mattered.

‍

‍    With the help of Jason Young, who served as recording engineer, setting up the microphones and supervised the recording, we taught the songs to our volunteers. Mom's granddaughter, Brook, helped wrangle her sisters, and in just two days, the recording sessions were complete.

‍

‍    Once the songs were recorded, I fired up my master CD duplicator and began making copies. After the recordings were uploaded online, requests began arriving from around the country.

‍

‍    Over the next several decades, the songs were requested by students, nonprofit organizations, museums, and documentary filmmakers. In 2011, they were also released on Spotify. The three songs requested most often for videos and documentaries have been ‘Roll Out the Airplanes, Yankee Doodle Pilots, and I Wanna Be a Miss H.P..”  

‍

‍MARCHING SONGS OF THE WASP — spotify 

‍

‍MARCHING SONGS OF THE WASP — apple music

‍

‍    Although I've included "We Got the Stuff, The Right Stuff" with the Marching Songs collection, it wasn't written until 1997. Without a doubt, it became the most iconic song ever written for the WASP—by a WASP—and the first and only WASP Rap. In one song, it tells the entire history of the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

‍

‍    The lyrics were written by WASP Deanie Parrish, who had never written a song before but believed that, with God's help, anything is possible. I recorded and performed the song in my home studio, with Mom cheering me on from the wings. But make no mistake—while it may be my voice on the WASP Rap, every word, every line, is Mom's.

‍

‍We Got the Stuff, The Right Stuff. reached far beyond

‍either of us could have ever imagined. 

‍Marching Songs of the WASP  2009 Nancy Parrish2