Rebel Records has reissued two Ralph Stanley albums as download only releases on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Both were originally released in the mid 1970s, during what is widely viewed as the hey day of Dr. Ralph’s post-Carter era, when the band included Keith Whitley, Curly Ray Cline and Jack Cooke.

The first of the two digital reissues is the all-Gospel, Let Me Rest On A Peaceful Mountain, which first came out in 1975, and which features some of the finest a cappella “mountain style” harmony you’ll ever find. The other, Old Home Place, was originally released the following year and includes Whitley singing the classic Sharecropper’s Son, and the cut of If That’s The Way You Feel, later covered (brilliantly) by Ricky Skaggs during his country period.

The album title links above will take you into the iTunes Music Store, but you must have a copy of iTunes software installed on your computer in order to hear the audio samples, or purchase these fine recordings. These two Rebel reissues are only available from iTunes.

We congratulate Rebel Records for making these wonderful albums available again, and hope to see this trend continue. There is a wealth of bluegrass music, out of print from an original LP release, which has never found its way onto CD. Sometimes individual tracks make it into box sets and collections, but we see this option of re-releasing them in toto, but for download only, as an excellent alternative – and one we hope to see repeated many times.