Dash Crofts, who as half of the duo Seals & Crofts scored a string of Top 10 hit singles in the 1970s, including “Summer Breeze,” “Diamond Girl” and “Get Closer,” died Wednesday at a hospital in Austin, Texas. He was 87 years old.
His daughter Lua Crofts Faragher told the New York Times that the cause of death was heart failure.
With his partner Jim Seals (who died in 2022), Crofts helped define the soft-rock sound of the era, layering lush harmony vocals over strummed guitars and soulful, slightly jazzy rhythms; The style, which emerged out of the cultural and political upheaval of the late '60s, offered comforting thoughts of romance and friendship and made stars of other artists such as America, Bread and James Taylor. Years after their heyday, Seals & Crofts would be considered purveyors of what became known as yacht rock.
Jim Seals, left, with Dudley Moore and Dash Crofts in Los Angeles in 1980.
(Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection / Getty Images)
The duo's biggest hit was 1972's “Summer Breeze,” which described a quiet Friday night at home:
Look at the smile that awaits you in the kitchen.
Cook food and dishes for two.
Feel the arms reaching out to embrace me
In the afternoon, when the day ends
With its image of a gentle breeze “blowing through the jasmine in my mind,” the song, which was nominated for a Grammy Award, peaked at No. 6 on Billboard's Hot 100 and pushed the band's album of the same name to double-platinum sales; On Spotify, “Summer Breeze,” which later appeared in movies and TV shows like “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 LP “3 + 3”; Two decades later, gothic metal band Type O Negative recorded a sludgy, slowed-down rendition.
Darrell George Crofts was born on August 14, 1938 in Cisco, Texas, where his father was a rancher. (His mother gave him the nickname Dash and 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 had 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 had already become involved in the Bahá'í faith.
In 1974, after the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the duo released “Unborn Child,” an anti-abortion song that drew widespread condemnation. Seals said in an interview with The Times in 1991 that “Unborn Child” “really just asked 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 before doing it.”
Seals & Crofts broke up around 1980, but later reunited to perform on the road; they released 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.
