Photo: Jim Seals & Darrell Crofts in 1975 | By Chris Willman, Variety | Jim Seals, who as part of the duo Seals and Crofts crafted memorably wistful 1970s hits like “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died Monday at age 80. No cause of death was immediately given.
Several friends and relatives confirmed the death. “I just learned that James ‘Jimmy’ Seals has passed,” announced his cousin, Brady Seals, a former member of the country band Little Texas, Monday night. “My heart just breaks for his wife Ruby and their children. Please keep them in your prayers. What an incredible legacy he leaves behind.”
Wrote John Ford Coley, “This is a hard one on so many levels as this is a musical era passing for me. And it will never pass this way again, as his song said,” he added, referring to the Seals and Croft hit “We May Never Pass This Way (Again).” Coley was a member of another hit duo of the era, England Dan and John Ford Coley, with Jim Seals’ younger brother, the late Dan Seals.
“You and Dan finally get reunited again,” Coley wrote. “Tell him and your sweet momma hi for me.”
With Jim Seals as the primary lead vocalist of the harmonizing duo, Seals and Crofts came to be the very emblem of “soft rock” with a run of hits that lasted for only about six years. Although none of the pair’s hits ever reached No. 1 on the Hot 100, their biggest songs were for a time as ubiquitous as any that did top the chart. “Summer Breeze” in 1972 and “Diamond Girl” in 1973 both reached No. 6, as did a more upbeat song in 1976, “Get Closer,” sung with Carolyn Willis.
Besides those three songs that reached the top 10 on the Hot 100, four more made it to the adult contemporary chart’s top 10: “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” in ’73, “I’ll Play for You” in ’75, “Goodbye Old Buddies” in ’77 and “You’re the Love” in ’78.
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In 1977, the duo contributed to the soundtrack for a basketball-based film, “One on One,” starring Robbie Benson. They didn’t write the songs — Paul Williams and Charles Fox did — but were prominently billed on the soundtrack album as the song score’s performers.
By the time they broke up in 1980, their brand of music was finding far less of a place in disco-fied top 40 stations. Seals moved to Costa Rica with his wife, Ruby, where they were reported to have run a coffee farm as they raised their three children, and Crofts and his family moved to Mexico and eventually Australia.
In 1991, when Seals and Crofts made a stab at a reunion, they talked about their breakup with the L.A. Times. “Around 1980,” Seals told the newspaper, “we were still drawing 10,000 to 12,000 people at concerts. But we could see, with this change coming where everybody wanted dance music, that those days were numbered. We just decided that it was a good time, after a long run at it, to lie back and not totally commit ourselves to that kind of thing because we were like (fish) out of water.”
Seals, who later moved to Nashville, was considered to have been retired from a music career even before he suffered a stroke in 2017 that put a halt to his playing.
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Seals is survived by Ruby and by their children Joshua, Juliette and Sutherland.
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Read the extensive bio here:
https://variety.com/2022/music/obituaries-people-news/jim-seals-dead-seals-crofts-summer-breeze-soft-rock-1235286748/
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OTHER NOTABLE MUSICIANS’ DEATHS
Our music community continues to lose our talented artists to COVID-19, suicides and murders – staggering losses. We are going to miss them so much. If you want to know more about any of the musicians we lost, please check them out at http://www.wikipedia.com
June 2022
8: Wolfgang Reisinger, 66, German jazz percussionist, ruptured aneurysm; Song Hae, 95, South Korean television host (Korea Sings) and singer.
6: Jim Seals, 79, American musician (Seals and Crofts, The Champs) and songwriter (“Summer Breeze”); Mikhail Vladimirov, 55, Russian guitarist (Mify, Chizh & Co) and songwriter.
5: Cinzia], 81, Italian singer; Eugen Mamot, 81, Moldovan composer; Trouble, 34, American rapper, shot; Václav Týfa, 79, Czech trumpeter.
4: Alec John Such, 70, American Hall of Fame bassist (Bon Jovi).
3: El Noba, 25, Argentine cumbia singer, injuries from traffic collision; Christopher Evans-Ironside, 82, English-German songwriter, composer and music producer; Ken Kelly, 76, American fantasy artist and album cover designer (Kiss, Rainbow, Manowar); Grachan Moncur III, 85, American jazz trombonist, cardiac arrest.
2: Kai Bumann, 61, German-Polish conductor and teacher (Warsaw Chamber Opera, Polish Baltic Philharmonic); Hal Bynum, 87, American songwriter (“Lucille”, “Chains”, “Papa Was a Good Man”), complications from a stroke and Alzheimer’s disease; Gracia Montes, 86, Spanish copla singer; Bhajan Sopori, 73, Indian santoor player, colon cancer; Jaromír Vogel, 78, Czech composer.
1: Deborah McCrary, 67, American gospel singer (The McCrary Sisters).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_2022
Jim Seals of Seals & Crofts // Other Notable Musicians’ Deaths
