Celebrity

Jim Seals, Half of a Popular 1970s Soft-Rock Duo, Dies at 79

Jim Seales, half of Shields & Crofts, a soft rock duo who recorded a series of hits including the top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl” in the 1970s, died at his home in Nashville on Monday night. He was 79 years old.

His wife, Ruby Jean Shields, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic ongoing illness.”

Shields and his music partner Dash Crofts were still teenagers when they were asked to join the instrumental group The Champs, which won first place in “Tequila” in 1958. By the mid-1960s, they were fed up with the band and the loud, sometimes angry tensions that were infusing hard rock at the time.

As Baha’i Faith followers, they sought to mix folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and harmonize the lyrics closely to create a more subdued brand of music.

“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and fiddle,” Don Heckman wrote in a brief review of his second album, Down Home, at the 1970s in the New York Times. They sing a very colorful vocal harmony that is coolly intertwined together. “

Released in 1972, the two have won international stars in their nostalgic, nimble single “Summer Breeze.” They were raising modest supporters, but the song changed everything as they knew when they arrived in Ohio to do the show.

“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Shields said. Texas Monthly In 2020. “That night we had a record crowd, perhaps 40,000 people, and they threw their hats and coats into the air against the moon as much as you could see. I remember.”

This song, co-written by two men, featured a chorus that pierced the brain.

“Summer breeze makes me feel better / blows through jasmine in my heart.”

The single came in 6th on the Billboard Hot 100, with the follow-up “Hummingbird” in the top 20. “Diamond Girl” It reached 6th place in 1973. “approach” It reached 6th place in 1976 as well.

However, the succession of duos basically ended at the end of the decade, and they called it quit for a while.

“Around 1980, we were still gathering 10,000 to 12,000 people at the concert,” Shields told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, when the two revived the act. “But when this change happened where everyone wanted dance music, it turned out to be counted at the time.”

But six years ago, the pair began to lose the support of some listeners and critics due to their sixth album, Unborn Child, released in 1974 shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision on Law vs. Wade. did. .. Title track He urged women who were thinking about abortion to “stop, look back, go back, and think again.”

In an interview with the Miami Herald in 1978, Shields admitted that this record hurt the duo’s career.

“It killed it completely for a while,” he said. The radio station refused to play the record. Some of the Shields & Crofts concerts were picketed, but there were also hundreds of supportive letters. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1991, Shields said the pair was not intended to be a lightning rod.

“It was our ignorance that we didn’t know that such a thing was boiling as a social problem,” he said. “On the one hand, some people sent us thousands of roses, while others literally threw rocks at us.

“If we knew it would cause such a discrepancy, we might have thought twice about doing it,” he continued. At that time, it obscured everything else we were trying to say in music. “

James Eugene Seals was born on October 17, 1942 in Wayland and Susan Seals, Sydney, Texas. His father worked in an oil field, and Jim spent much of his childhood in the boomtown of southwest Texas, Iraan.

“There were as many oil rigs as you could see,” Shields told Texas Monthly. “And the stink was so bad that you couldn’t breathe.”

Informal jam sessions were a common way to spend time at home, as his father played a small guitar and his mother played Dobro. One night, when Fidler arrived, the young Jim was taken with an instrument and his father ordered him one from the Sears catalog.

He then picked up the saxophone and was invited to a rockabilly band called Crew Cats, who danced and performed at local clubs. The band’s drummer quit shortly before the show at junior college, and another band’s drummer on the bill was sitting — Darrell Croft, known as Dash.

The two became friends and played with Champs for several years from Los Angeles. Both have mastered other instruments, including the guitar. When they made a big hit as a duo, they knew what they wanted to project and tried to stay true to it. In 1973, when they tried to tour Britain, Shields told reporters that he had withdrawn from his previous European engagement.

“We were planning to tour there before, but when we found out we were playing with Black Sabbath, we changed our minds at the last minute,” he said. “I’m sure they’re a great band, but I’m not sure if the audience is right for us.”

In addition to his wife, Shields is surviving by two sons, Joshua and Sutherland. Daughter Juliet Crosley. And three grandchildren. His sister Lenny Staley and his half-parent Eddie Ray Shields have also survived him. Dan Seals, a successful singer in the late 1970s as a member of another soft rock duo, England Dan & John Ford Corey, died in 2009. The two brothers toured together for several years before Dan Seals died. Jim Seales’ two sons sometimes play with them.

My A Coleman Report that contributed.

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