![]() The Summer Breeze album reached the Top 10 of the US album chart in 1972, the title song following suit on the singles chart. Under a deal with TA Records they made the albums Seals & Crofts (1969) and Down Home (1970), followed by Year of Sunday (1971) for A&M, but it was not until they signed a deal with Warner Bros that they struck it rich. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images The duo became adherents of the Bahá’í faith in the late 1960s. By 1969 they had shed their bandmates and become a duo. The band took its name from The Dawn-Breakers, a book originally written in Persian that detailed the formation of the Bahá’í faith, of which Seals and Crofts both became adherents and which would inform much of their work. ![]() In 1963 the pair joined with another ex-Champ, Glen Campbell, in Glen Campbell and the GCs, and when that band split up Seals and Crofts joined the Dawnbreakers. ![]() They then both joined the Champs (best known for their hit Tequila, though Seals and Crofts didn’t play on it), with whom they moved to California.Īs well as working with the Champs, they wrote and performed with numerous other artists, including the Monkees and Gene Vincent, and in 1961 Seals’s song It’s Never Too Late was the B-side of Brenda Lee’s hit single You Can Depend On Me. He met Crofts when he replaced the Crew Cats’ drummer at short notice, and the pair struck up a rapport. Jim also learned the saxophone, which he played with Dean Beard and the Crew Cats. Jim Seals plays the fiddle with Dash Crofts, as Seals and Crofts, in 1977. There was enough musical talent in the household to form the impromptu Seals Family Band, including Jim’s younger brother, Danny, who would later form half of the successful duo England Dan & John Ford Coley. Jim proved a fast learner and won several competitions, including the Texas state fiddle championship. When Jim showed an interest in the fiddle, his father bought him one from a Sears catalogue. Jim grew up in Iraan in Pecos County, and was encouraged to make music by his father, a skilled guitar player who performed with Tex Collins and the Tom Cats, and the Oil Patch Boys. Wayland worked as a pipe-fitter for the Shell oil company in the Yates oilfield. Their albums there on described a downward trajectory in the charts (though 1975’s Greatest Hits reached No 11 and registered double platinum in the US) and their final Top 10 single was Get Closer (1976), with guest vocals by Carolyn Willis.īorn in Sidney, Texas, Jim was the son of Wayland Seals and his wife, Susan (nee Taylor). The album still made the US Top 20, but Seals and Crofts had reached their commercial peak. At the time it overshadowed all the other things we were trying to say in our music.” It earned them the “Keep Her in Her Place” award from the National Organisation for Women in their 1974 roundup of male chauvinism. Seals later commented that “it was our ignorance that we didn’t know that kind of thing was seething and boiling as a social issue … If we’d known it was going to cause such disunity, we might have thought twice about doing it. The title track reflected the duo’s Bahá’í -inspired belief that life begins at the moment of conception, and its anti-abortion message, coming shortly after the 1973 Roe v Wade US supreme court judgment protecting women’s freedom to terminate a pregnancy, provoked a furious backlash and was banned by some radio stations. ![]() However, they ran into turbulence with their album Unborn Child (1974). Seals and Crofts performing Summer Breeze, which reached No 6 on the US chart in 1972
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