The Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes College's New Arboretum Records label has released a new arrangement of "America the Beautiful" that recasts the song in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta and features Bobby Rush, Eddie Cotton, A-list Memphis musicians, and Rhodes College students.

The Rhodes Board of Trustees announced today that internationally renowned Blues artist, Blues Hall of Fame inductee, and Grammy Award winner, Bobby Rush, whose career spans eight decades, will be this year’s recipient of the Honorary Doctorate of Humanities.

With the support of the Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes, Emma Jane Hopper ’22 and Elijah Matlock ’21 have been making quite a splash with Beyond Beale. The student-run podcast focuses on illuminating the underrepresented narratives of the Memphis music scene. In their first season, Matlock and Hopper took a deep dive into the integrated Memphis Country Blues Festival held at Overton Park Shell in the late 1960s; they also produced a mini-episode about the festival that garnered an honorable mention in NPR’s 2021 Student Podcast Challenge: College Edition.

Karl Erickson, assistant professor of art and art history, and Emily Burkhead, a senior urban studies major, will have their films featured at the annual Indie Memphis Film Festival to be held Oct. 30-Nov. 4.