Dash Crofts, who as half of the duo Seals & Crofts scored a string of easygoing Top 10 hits in the 1970s — including “Summer Breeze,” “Diamond Girl” and “Get Closer” — died Wednesday in a hospital in Austin, Texas. He was 87.
His daughter Lua Crofts Faragher told the New York Times the cause of death was heart failure.
With his partner Jim Seals (who died in 2022), Crofts helped define the era’s soft-rock sound, layering lush harmony vocals over strummy guitars and soulful, lightly jazzy grooves; the style, which emerged in the wake of the cultural and political turmoil of the late ’60s, offered comforting thoughts of romance and friendship and made stars of other acts such as America, Bread and James Taylor. Years after their heyday, Seals & Crofts would be regarded as purveyors of what came to be known as yacht rock.
The duo’s biggest hit was 1972’s “Summer Breeze,” which described a peaceful Friday night at home:
See the smile awaiting in the kitchen
Food cooking and the plates for two
Feel the arms that reach out to hold me
In the evening, when the day is through
With its image of a gentle breeze “blowing through the jasmine in my mind,” the song, which was nominated for a Grammy Award, reached No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and drove the band’s album by the same name to double-platinum sales; on Spotify, “Summer Breeze” — later featured in movies and TV shows including “Dazed and Confused” and “Freaks and Geeks” — has been streamed more than 320 million times. In 1973, the Isley Brothers remade the song on their “3 + 3” LP; two decades after that, the gothic metal band Type O Negative recorded a sludgy, slowed-down rendition.
Darrell George Crofts was born Aug. 14, 1938, in Cisco, Texas, where his father was a cattle rancher. (His mother gave him the nickname Dash and gave his twin sister, Dorothy, the nickname Dot.) After meeting as teenagers, he and Seals moved to California together in the late ’50s to pursue music and soon joined the Champs, who’d just topped the Hot 100 with the mostly instrumental hit “Tequila.”
Seals and Crofts played with the Champs — Glen Campbell was another member of the group — until the mid-’60s; they released their first album as Seals & Crofts in 1969, by which time they’d become involved in the Baha’i faith.
In 1974, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision, the duo released “Unborn Child,” an antiabortion song that drew widespread condemnation. Seals said in an interview with The Times in 1991 that “Unborn Child” was “really just asking a question: What about the child? We were trying to say, ‘This is an important issue,’ that life is precious and that we don’t know enough about these things yet to make a judgment.” He added that if he and Crofts had known the song “was going to cause such disunity, we might have thought twice about doing it.”
Seals & Crofts broke up around 1980 but later reunited to perform on the road; they put out an album called “Traces” in 2004. In addition to his daughter Lua, Crofts’ survivors include his wife, Louise; another daughter, Amelia Crofts Starkweather; and a son, Faizi.
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