Dash Crofts, who as half of the duo Seals and Crofts helped define the sound of “soft rock” in the 1970s with hits like “Summer Breeze,” Wednesday at age 87.
The news was first announced on social media by the duo’s producer, Louie Shelton. TMZ further reported that a family member said Crofts died from complications following heart surgery.
His partner, Jim Seals, died in 2022.
Seals and Crofts came to be the very emblem of “soft rock” with a run of hits that lasted for only about six years. Although none of the Texas-born pair’s hits ever reached No. 1 on the Hot 100, their biggest songs were for a time as ubiquitous as any that did top the chart. “Summer Breeze” in 1972 and “Diamond Girl” in 1973 both reached No. 6, as did a more upbeat song in 1976, “Get Closer,” sung with Carolyn Willis.
Besides those three songs that reached the top 10 on the Hot 100, four more made it to the adult contemporary chart’s top 10: “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” in ’73, “I’ll Play for You” in ’75, “Goodbye Old Buddies” in ’77 and “You’re the Love” in ’78.
Critic Robert Christgau called the duo “folk-schlock,” but Seals and Crofts had the last laugh — or would have, if crowing with vindication was part of the Baha’i way. Both members of the duo were deeply embedded in that peace-loving faith from the late ’60s forward.
The duo broke up in 1980, followed by a couple of very fleeting reunions in the early ’90s and early 2000s, which generated only one album after their original run, the little-noticed “Traces” in 2004, They never reembarked together on the kind of nostalgia-stoking package tours that would have seemed a natural for an act with so many well-remembered hits. But neither member showed a particularly heavy interest in chasing the limelight after the 1970s.
For several years in the late ’50s and early ’60s, both Seals and Crofts were members of a group that bore little stylistic similarity to their later act: the Champs, although they joined after that band had recorded its signature hit, “Tequila.” Seals played sax in that group and Crofts was on drums.
Darrell “Dash” Crofts was two years older than Seals and the more outgoing of the two. He grew up the son of a Texas cattle rancher. Crofts first invited his friend to join a group called the Crew Cats in the mid-1950s, and then in 1958, the offer came to join the Champs, who’d recently had a No. 1 smash with “Tequila.” They stayed with that band till quitting in 1965.
The pair moved to L.A. and joined a group called the Dawnbreakers, also playing for a time behind Glen Campbell, just before he broke out as a major star. Their manager, Marcia Day, was a member of the Baha’i faith, and the house they shared on Sunset Blvd. was full of adherents as well as secular members of the local rock scene; in 1967, five years before having their first hit, both Seals and Crofts converted.
Abandoning their former instruments for something more folk-rock-friendly, Seals took up the guitar and Crofts — whose first love was jazz, followed by rock ‘n’ roll — learned the mandolin.
But he had played the drums prior to that. “I was singing the whole time from behind the drums, and then when we became Seals & Crofts and decided to go with a record company, Warner Bros., I changed instruments,” he said in a 2022 podcast. “I went from drums and piano to mandolin because I wanted to have an instrument that lent itself to the guitar. And these two worked really well together and allowed us to finish writing a lot of the songs that we were already working on.”
In a 1971 interview with Stereo Review, Crofts talked about their sound becoming gentler at that time. “I think we’d be better off not even to classify it,” he said. “Some people have called it religious music. It’s not actually religious music, though it is inspired by religion. But no particular musical group influenced us, and I think that’s one of the reasons that what is coming out is really us.” Crofts said that he and Seals would “come home after some kind of a hard rock gig and we go in the back room and play this kind of music all night. We’ve been in the hard rock scene for a long, long time, and we never mind hearing it and being around it. But playing it gets to be pretty tough physically after a while. … It’s such a nice relief to just sit and play pretty stuff for a change.”
Of the spiritual influence, Crofts said in 1971, “The Baha’i faith teaches the unity of people of all races, creeds, religions, politics, and truths.. … I’ve been a Baha’i for about four years and Jimmy’s been one for about three, three and a half. In living according to Baha’i teachings, we have changed many of our concepts, our awarenesses of our lives, and therefore our music has changed too. It’s actually another awareness that we’ve come into- a matter of evolution, so to speak. You start out writing songs like ‘the leaves are green and the sky is blue and I love you and you love me’ – very simple lyrics – but you grow into a much, much broader awareness of life, of love, and of unity. It’s really great to be able to say something real in your music.”
Their first three albums as a duo, between 1969-71, had a sweet sound but went little-noticed. They tried cutting “Summer Breeze” earlier but didn’t come up with a version they liked until their third album in 1972, which they named after the track. It caught on at radio, region by region. Seals was quoted in Texas Monthly as having noted the sudden shift when they arrived for a gig in Ohio: “There were kids waiting for us at the airport. That night we had a record crowd, maybe 40,000 people. And I remember people throwing their hats and coats in the air as far as you could see, against the moon. Prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.”
After several more major and minor hits followed, including “Diamond Girl,” wrote Texas Monthly, the duo had their own private jet yet “would come out and sit at the edge of the stage and hold firesides about the Baha’i faith with curious fans. In 1974 they played the California jam, along with Deep Purple and the Eagles, in front of hundreds of thousands. When Jim pulled out his fiddle for a hoedown on ‘Fiddle in the Sky,’ throngs of sunbaked hippies clapped along.”
The duo stirred controversy in 1974 by recording an anti-abortion song, “Unborn Child,” as their album’s track in 1974 in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision. The belief that abortion was wrong came out of their shared Baha’i beliefs, and they released it over the objections of their label, Warner Bros.
In 1977, the duo contributed to the soundtrack for a basketball-based film, “One on One,” starring Robbie Benson. They didn’t write the songs — Paul Williams and Charles Fox did — but were prominently billed on the soundtrack album as the song score’s performers.
By the time they broke up in 1980, their brand of music was finding far less of a place in disco-fied top 40 stations. Seals moved to Costa Rica with his wife, Ruby, where they were reported to have run a coffee farm as they raised their three children, and Crofts and his family moved to Mexico and eventually Australia.
They reunited to tour in the years 1989-92 before breaking up again. Another reunion transpired in 2004, this time resulting in their first album together since 1980.
In 2010, the duo’s daughters, Juliet (Seals) Crossley and Amelia (Crofts) Dailey, formed a group called the Humming Birds. That tradition of keeping the family business alive with a new generation continued in 2018 when Brady Seals, the cousin of Jim Seals, and Lua Crofts, Dash Crofts’ daughter, formed the duo Seals & Crofts 2.
No funeral arrangements were immediately announced.
