Jim Seals, half of Seals & Crofts, a soft rock duo that had a string of hits in the 1970s, including the top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died Monday night at his home in Nashville. He was 79 years old.
His wife, Ruby Jean Seals, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic continuing illness.”
Mr. Seals and his musical partner, Dash Crofts, were still teenagers when they were asked to join an instrumental group, the Champs, which had a No. 1 hit in 1958 with “Tequila.” By the mid-1960s they were tired of the band and the strong, sometimes angry, rhythms that permeated the hard rock of the time.
Adhering to the Baha’i faith, they tried to make a calmer music, mixing folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and offering their lyrics in close harmony.
“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and violin,” Don Heckman wrote to The New York Times in 1970 in a brief review of his second album, “Down Home,” and Dash Crofts plays electric mandolin and piano; they sing a freshly intertwined and quite colorful vocal harmony “.
With the simple and nostalgic “Summer Breeze”, released in 1972, the two found international fame. They had developed a modest following, but that song changed everything, as they knew when they came to Ohio to play a show.
“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Mr. Seals in Texas Monthly in 2020. “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 they could see, against the moon.”
The song, written jointly by the two men, featured the kind of heart that sticks to the brain:
“The summer breeze makes me feel good, / blowing through the jasmine of my mind.”
The single reached number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a track, “Hummingbird,” reached the Top 20. “Diamond Girl” in 1973 reached number 6. “Get Closer” in 1976 also reached number 6. .
But the duo’s series of hits basically ended when the decade passed, and they left it for a while.
“Around 1980, we were still attracting 10,000 to 12,000 people to concerts,” Seals told The Los Angeles Times in 1991, when they both relived the event. “But we could see, with this change coming where everyone wanted dance music, that those days were numbered.”
Six years earlier, however, the couple had begun to lose favor with some listeners and critics over their sixth album, “Unborn Child,” which was released in 1974 shortly after the Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade on abortion rights. . The lead song urged women who were considering an abortion to “stop, turn around, go back, think about it.”
Mr. Seals, in a 1978 interview with The Miami Herald, acknowledged that the record damaged the duet’s career.
“He killed her completely for a while,” she said. Radio stations refused to play the record. Some Seals & Crofts concerts were picketed, though there were also hundreds of letters of support. In a 1991 Los Angeles Times interview, Mr. Seals said the couple never wanted the song to be a lightning rod.
“Our ignorance was that we didn’t know this kind of thing was boiling and boiling like a social problem,” he said. “On the one hand we had people sending us thousands of roses, but on the other hand they were literally throwing stones at us.
“If we had known it would cause so much disunity,” he continued, “we could have thought twice about it. At that time it overshadowed all the other things we were trying to say to our music.”
James Eugene Seals was born on October 17, 1942 in Sydney, Texas to Wayland and Susan Seals. His father worked in the oil fields and Jim spent much of his childhood in Iraan, a booming city in southwest Texas.
“There were oil rigs so you could see,” Mr. Seals a Texas Monthly. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.”
Her dad played a bit of guitar and her mom played double bass, so casual jam sessions were a common way to spend time at home. One evening when a violinist came, young Jim was picked up with the instrument and his father ordered one from a Sears catalog.
He later picked up the saxophone, which led to an invitation to join a rockabilly band called Crew Cats who played at local dances and clubs. The band’s drummer left just before a show at a university, and the drummer on the other side of the lineup sat on Darrell Crofts, known as Dash.
The two became friends and played with the Camps for several years outside of Los Angeles. They both mastered other instruments, including the guitar. Once they grew up as a duo, they knew the image they wanted to project and tried to stay true to it. In 1973, when they were about to tour England, Mr. Seals told a reporter they had withdrawn from a previous European engagement.
“We were touring there before, but we had a last-minute change of heart when we knew we were going to play with Black Sabbath,” he said. “I’m sure they’re a good band, but I’m not sure the audience is right for us.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Seals is survived by his two sons, Joshua and Sutherland; a daughter, Juliet Crossley; and three grandchildren. A sister, Renee Staley, and a half-brother, Eddie Ray Seals, also survive. His brother, Dan Seals, a singer who was successful in the late 1970s as a member of another soft rock duo, England Dan & John Ford Coley, died in 2009. The two brothers made a they toured together for several years before Dan Seals ‘death, with Jim Seals’ two children sometimes playing with them.
Maia Coleman helped report.