The musician born Darrell George Crofts, one half of Seals & Crofts, the soft rock duo that gave the 1970s some of its most enduring radio staples, passed away Wednesday from complications of heart surgery.
He was 85. A family member confirmed the news to TMZ.
The death was first announced publicly by producer Louie Shelton, who had worked with the duo on their most significant albums, early Thursday morning. No plans for a memorial have been set.
Crofts was the last surviving member of Seals & Crofts. His partner Jim Seals died in June 2022 at the age of 79.
With Crofts’ passing, the duo that once sold out arenas and landed five consecutive gold albums at the peak of the soft rock era belongs entirely to history.
How Did Crofts Get Started In Music?
Darrell Crofts was born on August 14, 1938, in Cisco, Texas, a small city in Eastland County where cattle ranching was the primary industry and his father was part of that world.
His nickname Dash came in infancy, according to family lore, his mother entered him and his twin sister Dorothy into a beauty contest and suggested they would look cuter billed as Dot and Dash.
Crofts grew up playing drums and piano, gravitating early toward music in a part of Texas where entertainment was largely self-made.
He was still a teenager when he began playing in local bands, which is how he crossed paths with a young guitarist and fiddle player named Jim Seals, also from Texas, born in Sidney, about 75 miles away.
The two found each other through a series of small regional bands in the mid-to-late 1950s, eventually sharing a lineup in Dean Beard and the Crew Cats.
That connection led them both to California and one of the more unexpected early chapters in either man’s biography: touring with The Champs.
The Champs had scored one of the definitive rock and roll instrumental hits of the era, “Tequila,” a No. 1 smash in 1958, and Seals and Crofts joined the band after that breakthrough, not before it.
They were there for the legacy, not the landmark. They stayed with The Champs until 1965, a period during which they also crossed paths with a young Glen Campbell, who briefly formed a splinter group with them called Glen Campbell and the GCs before everyone went their separate ways.
The Road To Seals & Crofts
After The Champs dissolved, both men drifted for a few years. Crofts returned to Texas. Seals joined a group called the Dawnbreakers, named after a book about the early history of the Bahá’í Faith.
Crofts eventually came back to California and joined Seals in the Dawnbreakers, and that is where both men encountered the religion that would define the rest of their lives and, eventually, their music.
Through a woman named Marcia Day, who later became their manager, both Seals and Crofts converted to the Bahá’í Faith in 1969. Crofts married Billie Lee Day, Marcia’s sister, the same year.
The Bahá’í Faith is rooted in the 19th-century Persian prophet Bahá’u’lláh and centers on the unity of all religions, the equality of all people, and the essential oneness of humanity. For Seals and Crofts, it was not background to their music, it was the engine of it.
Their lyrics consistently drew on its principles. They stayed on stage after concerts to speak with interested fans about the faith while Bahá’í volunteers distributed literature.
This made them unusual figures in an era when rock musicians generally kept their spiritual lives either private or performatively irreverent. Seals and Crofts were neither.
They signed with Warner Bros. Records and released their debut album in 1969. It went nowhere. So did the second.
The third, Year of Sunday in 1971, was the first produced by Louie Shelton and the first to crack the Billboard 200. But it was the fourth album that changed everything.
Summer Breeze And The Peak Years
Summer Breeze was released in September 1972. Its title track, gentle, melodic, built around acoustic guitar and Crofts’ mandolin work, with the kind of layered harmonies that made the soft rock genre feel like a warm room to step into, reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of the most-played songs on American radio.
The album went gold before the end of the year and has since sold over two million copies in the United States.
The duo did not rest on the moment. Diamond Girl followed in 1973 and its title track peaked at No. 6 as well.
Then Unborn Child in 1974, which produced their most controversial moment: the title track was an anti-abortion song written in direct response to the Roe v. Wade decision the previous year.
Crofts’ sister-in-law had written a poem after watching a documentary on abortion, and Seals set it to music.
Radio stations were divided, some banned it, others added it to rotation, but the album still went gold and the duo performed it to enormous crowds, including at the California Jam festival in Ontario that April, which drew over 200,000 people and featured them alongside Black Sabbath, the Eagles, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Deep Purple, and Earth Wind & Fire.
The hits continued: I’ll Play for You in 1975 with the No. 18 title single; Get Closer in 1976 with its title track hitting No. 6 for the third time in their career, a remarkable consistency, the same peak position across three different eras of the chart.
Their Greatest Hits compilation, released in 1975, was eventually certified double platinum.
Between 1972 and 1976 they released five gold albums for Warner Bros. Their catalog accumulated an additional double platinum greatest hits package. They played the biggest stages in the country.
And then, as dance music swallowed pop radio in the late 1970s, the landscape shifted.
Their last Warner Bros. album, The Longest Road, came out in 1980 and failed to chart. Their contract was not renewed. They took a hiatus.
Life After The Peak
Crofts did not stop making music. He moved to Mexico, then to Australia, then to Nashville, where he released country singles and maintained a musical presence throughout the 1980s.
In 1998 he released a solo album called Today, which consisted largely of new recordings of Seals & Crofts material.
He eventually settled on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country, raising Arabian horses and living a life considerably quieter than the tour circuit years had been.
The duo reunited briefly twice, a short tour in 1991 and 1992, and then more substantially in 2003 and 2004 when they recorded Traces, their first album of new material since 1980.
That album included reworked arrangements of their classics and some original songs. They toured in support of it through 2005.
Seals died in June 2022. The news was confirmed by multiple family members and friends. Crofts, already in his 80s, outlived his partner by nearly four years.
The Legacy Crofts Leaves Behind
“Summer Breeze” has never stopped being played. It was covered by the Isley Brothers in 1974, a funkier, expanded version that gave the song new life on R&B radio and became one of their best-known recordings.
The original continues to stream in the millions annually. “Diamond Girl,” “We May Never Pass This Way Again,” “Get Closer,” “I’ll Play for You,” these are songs that defined what soft rock could be at its best, melodically sophisticated, and lyrically earnest.
Crofts was the instrumental anchor of the partnership, the mandolin player, the drummer, the second voice in harmonies that made the whole thing work.
He was not the primary songwriter but he was the sonic architecture. Without the mandolin, without the second vocal, without the percussion sensibility that started in small Texas bars in the 1950s, there is no Summer Breeze.
He was 85.
