Rodney Crowell's Diamonds & Dirt album returns to streaming after two years offline

Rodney Crowell's 1988 album Diamonds & Dirt is back on streaming and download services after more than two years offline, Saving Country Music reported on August 7, the same day Crowell turned 76. The album disappeared online in July 2024 for reasons that were never publicly explained, and fans noticed its return only a few days before the outlet's report.

Diamonds & Dirt was a turning point in Crowell's career: it produced five consecutive No. 1 country singles between 1988 and 1989, all from the same record, a feat that was a record in country music at the time, before Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Clint Black arrived on the scene. The hits included "I Couldn't Leave You If I Tried" and "It's Such A Small World," a duet with his then-wife Rosanne Cash, plus a chart-topping cover of Harlan Howard's "Above and Beyond."

The album was produced by Tony Brown with a lineup of Nashville session players: Paul Franklin on steel guitar, Mark O'Connor on fiddle, Eddie Bayers on drums and Vince Gill on backing vocals. Saving Country Music placed it alongside other albums that had similarly vanished from streaming over apparent publishing disputes, including Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose and Tompall Glaser's songs on Wanted: The Outlaws.

The reissue comes a few months after Crowell released Then Again, an album he recorded in 2005 with the same band behind his early-2000s trilogy The Houston Kid, Fate's Right Hand and The Outsider, but shelved for two decades before putting it out on June 26, 2026.

Saving Country Music framed the reissue as one more reason Crowell belongs in the Country Music Hall of Fame, either as a songwriter or a performer, pointing to his birthday as a fitting moment to make the case. Diamonds & Dirt is back on country streaming platforms now, joining the rest of the week's reissues tracked on the release calendar.