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.

Several friends and relatives confirmed the death. “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,” wrote John Ford Coley, of another hit duo of the era, England Dan and John Ford Coley, referring to the Seals and Croft hit “We May Never Pass This Way (Again).”

“You and Dan finally get reunited again,” Coley added, referring to his own late musical partner, Danny Seals, better known as “England Dan,” the younger brother of Jim Seals. “Tell him and your sweet momma hi for me.”

With Jim Seals as the primary lead vocalist of the harmonizing duo, they 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.

Critic Robert Christgau called the duo “folk-schlock,” but Seals and Crofts had the last laugh, or would have, if crowing with vindication was part of the Baha’i way. Both members of the duo were deeply embedded in that faith from the late ’60s forward.

The duo broke up in 1980, followed by a couple of very fleeting reunions in the early ’90s and early 2000s, which generated only one album after their original run, the little-noticed “Traces” in 2004, They never reembarked together on the kind of nostalgia-stoking package tours that would have seemed a natural for an act with so many well-remembered hits. But neither member showed a particularly heavy interest in chasing the limelight after the 1970s.

John Ford Coley shared his thoughts at length in a Facebook post. “I spent a large portion of my musical life with this man,” he wrote. “He was Dan’s older brother, (and) it was Jimmy that gave Dan and me our stage name. He taught me how to juggle, made me laugh, pissed me off, encouraged me, showed me amazing worlds and different understandings on life, especially on a philosophical level; showed me how expensive golf was and how to never hit a golf ball because next came the total annihilation of a perfectly good golf club, and the list goes on and on. We didn’t always see eye to eye, especially as musicians, but we always got along and I thought he was a bona fide, dyed-in the-wool musical genius and a very deep and contemplative man. He was an enigma and I always had regard for his opinion.

“I listened to him and I learned from him,” Coley continued. “We didn’t always agree and it wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always fun but it definitely was always entertaining for sure. Dan adored his older brother and it was because of Jimmy opening doors for us that we came to Los Angeles to record and meet the right people. … He belonged to a group that was one of a kind. I am very sad over this but I have some of the best memories of all of us together.”

For several years in the late ’50s and early ’60s, both Seals and Dash Crofts — who survives his partner — were members of a group that bore little stylistic similarity to their later act: the Champs, although they joined after that band had recorded its signature hit, “Tequila.” Seals played sax in that group and Crofts was on drums.

James Eugene Seals was born in 1942 to an oilman, Wayland Seals, and his wife Cora. ““There were oil rigs as far as you could see,” Seals told an interviewer of his upbringing in Iraan, Texas. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.” Jim became transfixed by a visiting fiddler and his father ordered him an instrument from the Sears catalog when he was 5 or 6. In a 1952 contest in west Texas, Jim won the fiddle division while his father triumphed in the guitar category. His little brother, Dan, later to be a pop star himself, took up the stand-up bass.

Jim took up sax at age 13 and began playing with a local band, the Crew Cats, when rock ‘n’ roll broke out in 1955. The shy musician joined up with the more outgoing Darrell “Dash” Crofts, who was two years older and grew up the son of a Texas cattle rancher, inviting his friend to join the Crew Cats as well. In 1958, the offer came to join the Champs, who’d recently had a No. 1 smash with “Tequila.” They stayed with that band till quitting in 1965.

The pair moved to L.A. and joined a group called the Dawnbreakers. Their manager, Marcia Day, was a member of the Baha’i faith, and the house they shared on Sunset Blvd. was full of adherents as well as secular members of the local rock scene; in 1967, several years before having their first hit, both Seals and Crofts converted.

Abandoning their former instruments for something more folk-rock-friendly, Seals took up the guitar and Crofts learned the mandolin. Their first three albums as a duo, between 1969-71, had a sweet sound but went little-noticed. They tried cutting “Summer Breeze” earlier but didn’t come up with a version they liked until their third album in 1972, which they named after the track. It caught on at radio, region by region. Seals told Texas Monthly about noting the sudden shift when they arrived for a gig in Ohio: “There were kids waiting for us at the airport. 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. Prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.”

After several more major and minor hits followed, including “Diamond Girl,” wrote Texas Monthly, the duo had their own private jet yet “would come out and sit at the edge of the stage and hold firesides about the Baha’i faith with curious fans. In 1974 they played the California jam, along with Deep Purple and the Eagles, in front of hundreds of thousands. When Jim pulled out his fiddle for a hoedown on ‘Fiddle in the Sky,’ throngs of  sunbaked hippies clapped along.”

The duo stirred controversy in 1974 by recording an anti-abortion song, “Unborn Child,” as their album’s track in 1974 in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision. The belief that abortion was wrong came out of their shared Baha’i beliefs, and they released it over the objections of their label, Warner Bros.

More to come…

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