Dash Crofts, 'Summer Breeze' hitmaker with Seals & Crofts, dies at 87

Dash Crofts, who arsenic fractional of the duo Seals & Crofts scored a drawstring of easygoing Top 10 hits successful the 1970s — including “Summer Breeze,” “Diamond Girl” and “Get Closer” — died Wednesday successful a infirmary successful Austin, Texas. He was 87.

His girl Lua Crofts Faragher told the New York Times the origin of decease was bosom failure.

With his spouse Jim Seals (who died successful 2022), Crofts helped specify the era’s soft-rock sound, layering lush harmony vocals implicit strummy guitars and soulful, lightly jazzy grooves; the style, which emerged successful the aftermath of the taste and governmental turmoil of the precocious ’60s, offered comforting thoughts of romance and relationship and made stars of different acts specified arsenic America, Bread and James Taylor. Years aft their heyday, Seals & Crofts would beryllium regarded arsenic purveyors of what came to beryllium known arsenic yacht rock.

Jim Seals, left, with Dudley Moore and Dash Crofts successful Los Angeles successful 1980.

(Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection / Getty Images)

The duo’s biggest deed was 1972’s “Summer Breeze,” which described a peaceful Friday nighttime astatine home:

See the grin awaiting successful the kitchen

Food cooking and the plates for two

Feel the arms that scope retired to clasp me

In the evening, erstwhile the time is through

With its representation of a gentle breeze “blowing done the jasmine successful my mind,” the song, which was nominated for a Grammy Award, reached No. 6 connected Billboard’s Hot 100 and drove the band’s medium by the aforesaid sanction to double-platinum sales; connected Spotify, “Summer Breeze” — aboriginal featured successful movies and TV shows including “Dazed and Confused” and “Freaks and Geeks” — has been streamed much than 320 cardinal times. In 1973, the Isley Brothers remade the opus connected their “3 + 3” LP; 2 decades aft that, the gothic metallic set Type O Negative recorded a sludgy, slowed-down rendition.

Darrell George Crofts was calved Aug. 14, 1938, successful Cisco, Texas, wherever his begetter was a cattle rancher. (His parent gave him the nickname Dash and gave his duplicate sister, Dorothy, the nickname Dot.) After gathering arsenic teenagers, helium and Seals moved to California unneurotic successful the precocious ’50s to prosecute euphony and soon joined the Champs, who’d conscionable topped the Hot 100 with the mostly instrumental deed “Tequila.”

Seals and Crofts played with the Champs — Glen Campbell was different subordinate of the radical — until the mid-’60s; they released their archetypal medium arsenic Seals & Crofts successful 1969, by which clip they’d go progressive successful the Baha’i faith.

In 1974, connected the heels of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision, the duo released “Unborn Child,” an antiabortion opus that drew wide condemnation. Seals said successful an interrogation with The Times successful 1991 that “Unborn Child” was “really conscionable asking a question: What astir the child? We were trying to say, ‘This is an important issue,’ that beingness is precious and that we don’t cognize capable astir these things yet to marque a judgment.” He added that if helium and Crofts had known the opus “was going to origin specified disunity, we mightiness person thought doubly astir doing it.”

Seals & Crofts broke up astir 1980 but aboriginal reunited to execute connected the road; they enactment retired an medium called “Traces” successful 2004. In summation to his girl Lua, Crofts’ survivors see his wife, Louise; different daughter, Amelia Crofts Starkweather; and a son, Faizi.