Dash Crofts, half of the soft-rock duo Seals & Crofts, which found enduring success with the easy-listening hit “Summer Breeze” in 1972, died on Wednesday in Austin, Texas. He was 87.
His daughter Lua Crofts Faragher said his death, in a hospital, was from heart failure.
A rangy, nasally tenor, Mr. Crofts rounded out the smooth lead vocals of his music partner, Jim Seals, in a series of popular records in the 1970s. Mr. Seals died in 2022.
Mr. Crofts and Mr. Seals, who as adherents of the Baha’i faith imbued their music with religious themes, started as a duo in 1969 and stayed together until 1980. They produced the jazzy, upbeat “Diamond Girl,” the quirky, naturalistic “Hummingbird,” the feathery, soulful “Get Closer” and the wistful “We May Never Pass This Way Again” — all reaching the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100.
But it was “Summer Breeze,” which peaked at No. 6, that proved the most lasting, with its memorable opening guitar lick, gentle melody and simple, reassuring refrain: “Summer breeze makes me feel fine / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”
The song describes music wafting from a house as evening light comes through a window. Mr. Crofts said Mr. Seals had written the song, though they shared the writing credits.
“It gives me this warm feeling,” Mr. Crofts once told the VH1 program “8-Track Flashback,” and a “feeling of security and belonging.”
In a 2022 ranking of the greatest summer songs of all time, Rolling Stone magazine listed “Summer Breeze” at No. 20. It described Seals & Crofts as one of the “signature soft-rock groups” of the early 1970s.
Their music melded myriad traditions: bluegrass, country, folk, classical and jazz. Mr. Crofts played drums, piano and mandolin; Mr. Seals strummed a guitar or played fiddle. Mr. Crofts kept his hair long and had a thick beard; the goateed Mr. Seals wore a newsboy cap over his equally long hair. Mr. Crofts hit the higher notes; sometimes, he danced onstage.
The two had met as teenagers in central Texas and became friends in the 1950s, playing in a local band and ultimately chasing their music dreams to California.
Early on, they played together with the California band the Dawnbreakers and the instrumental group the Champs. The Champs topped the charts in 1958 with “Tequila.”
Mr. Crofts and Mr. Seals were drawn to the Baha’i faith in the 1960s, influenced by Mr. Crofts’s girlfriend at the time and later his wife, Billie Fein, an adherent.
Inspired by the religion, which emphasizes equality and the unity of all people, and seeking to write relaxing harmonies, Mr. Crofts and Mr. Seals started to release music under the name Seals & Crofts at the end of the 1960s. (They would later often remain onstage after their concerts to discuss their faith.)
“We were tired of loud music,” Mr. Crofts told Texas Monthly in an interview in 2020. “We were tired of rock ’n’ roll.”
They soon drew critical acclaim. In a 1970 review in The New York Times, Don Heckman singled out their “quite colorful” harmonies. A year later, Mr. Heckman wrote that they were “hitting their stride.”
But not everyone was impressed with their soft-rock style. The New York critic Robert Christgau labeled the duo’s music “folk-schlock,” and even “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock” disparaged the singers as “undoubtedly the super wimps of the seventies.”
Still, Seals & Crofts found global stardom with the release of “Summer Breeze” in 1972, their biggest commercial success.
The pair remained a popular act throughout the decade but lost fans over their album “Unborn Child,” released in 1974, a year after the Supreme Court recognized a nationwide right to abortion under the Constitution. In the album’s provocative title track, the singers urged women seeking abortions to “Stop! Turn around. Go back. Think it over.”
Some radio stations refused to play the song, and protesters picketed Seals & Crofts concerts.
“Warner Brothers warned us against it,” Mr. Crofts told Goldmine magazine in 1992. “They said, ‘This is a highly controversial subject, we advise that you don’t do this.’ And we said, ‘But you’re in the business to make money; we’re doing it to save lives. We don’t care about the money.”
Mr. Seals later said that the album had derailed the duo’s professional fortunes for a period and distracted from other points that they had wanted to express in their music.
But Mr. Crofts saw benefits, too.
“It hurt us in one way and helped us in another,” he told Goldmine. “It turns over fans, is what it does. If you’re against something, you lose those fans. But if you’re for it, you gain some fans. And that’s kind of what happened.”
Darrell George Crofts was born in Cisco, Texas, on Aug. 14, 1938, to Sutton and Mary (French) Crofts. His father was a cattle rancher, while his mother kept the home. (Darrell acquired the nickname Dash from his mother, who had entered him and his twin sister, Dorothy, in a “beautiful baby” contest in their hometown, billing them as Dot and Dash.)
At age 17, while drumming for a band called the Crew Cats, he met a 13-year-old saxophone player in Cisco named James Seals, who was then called Jimmy. Later, with the Champs on tour and in need of replacement musicians, they invited the young Mr. Seals and Mr. Crofts to join them, on the recommendation of the Crew Cats’ manager.
When they headed for California, the two were so young that a guardian came with them. They were almost inseparable for the better part of the next two decades.
Seals & Crofts was managed by Marcia Day, whose daughter Billie married Mr. Crofts in 1970. The couple had three children and divorced in 1989. Mr. Crofts and his second wife, Louise Crofts, were married in 1995.
In addition to this daughter Lua, he is survived by his wife; another daughter, Amelia Crofts Starkweather; a son, Faizi; his sister, Dot Mittle; and eight grandchildren. In his later years, Mr. Croft lived on a ranch in Johnson City, Texas.
When Seals & Crofts broke up in 1980, the act was still drawing 10,000 people to a typical concert, by Mr. Seals’s account.
Mr. Crofts and Mr. Seals gave shifting explanations for their split: Dance music was on its way in. They had young children. They were out of things to say.
But there were no signs that the breakup was bitter. The two men, who both later spent time living outside the United States, appeared together in reunion concert tours. In 1998, Mr. Crofts released a solo album, “Today,” but they teamed up again with the release of another Seals & Crofts album, “Traces,” in 2004.
“We are exactly like brothers,” Mr. Crofts once said.
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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