Musician Jim Seals, half of the famed soft-rock duo Seals and Crofts, has died. He was 80. Seals death came on Monday and was confirmed by several family members and friends on social media. His cousin, Brady Seals — a former member of the country band Little Texas — shared the news on social media Monday night.
Jim Seals: Who was| Cause of death| Obituary| How did die
Who was:
Musician Jim Seals, half of the famed soft-rock duo Seals and Crofts, has died. He was 80. Seals death came on Monday and was confirmed by several family members and friends on social media.
Jim Seals, half of Seals & Crofts, a soft-rock duo who had a string of hits in the 1970s, including the Top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died on Monday at his home in Nashville.
Cause of Death:
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 had tired of the band and of the loud, sometimes angry strains that were infusing the hard rock of the time.
Obituary:
Adherents of the Baha’i faith, they sought to make a calmer brand of music, mixing folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and delivering their lyrics in close harmony.
“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and fiddle,” Don Heckman wrote in The New York Times in 1970 in a brief review of their second album, “Down Home,” “and Dash Crofts plays electric mandolin and piano; together they sing coolly intertwined, and quite colorful, vocal harmony.”
He was 79. His wife, Ruby Jean Seals, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic ongoing illness.”
How did die:
With the lilting, nostalgia-seeped single “Summer Breeze,” released in 1972, the two found international stardom. They had developed a modest following, but that song changed everything, as they found out when they arrived in Ohio to play a show.
“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Mr. Seals told 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 you could see, against the moon.”
