Jim Seals, one-half of the soft rock group Seals And Crofts, has died at 80. His cousin Brady Seals shared a statement to Variety: “I just learned that James ‘Jimmy’ Seals has passed. My heart just breaks for his wife Ruby and their children. Please keep them in your prayers. What an incredible legacy he leaves behind.”

Seals was born in 1942 in Texas. He learned to play the saxophone when he was a teenager, and started playing with a local band fronted by Dean Beard in the mid-50s. Fellow Texas teen Darrel “Dash” Crofts also became involved with the group as a drummer, and the pair hit it off. They would soon link up with the Los Angeles band the Champs in 1958, shortly after they had released their hit song “Tequila,” and stayed with them until 1965. During that time, Seals wrote a song, “It’s Never Too Late,” that was recorded by Brenda Lee.

After leaving the Champs, Seals and Crofts played in a band with Glen Campbell and Jerry Cole (who had also clocked time in the Champs) but eventually moved back to Texas and started a group called the Dawnbreakers, named after a formative text of the Baháʼí Faith. (Seals and Crofts were both proponents of Baháʼí.) The Dawnbreakers fizzled out, and Seals and Crofts decided to forge ahead as a duo. They released their debut album, Seals & Crofts, in 1969.

It wasn’t until their fourth album, Summer Breeze, came out in 1972, that the band started to score their biggest hits and also landed on their characteristic sound. That record spun off its successful title track and the years that followed included tracks like “Diamond Girl,” “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” and “Get Closer.” They rode the soft-rock wave for a few more albums, including an album called Unborn Child that was released right after Roe v. Wade and expressed anti-abortion views. They had a few more minor hits in the last half of the ’70s, including “You’re The Love,” but they were dropped by Warner Bros. in 1980 after The Longest Road and decided to take a hiatus and devote themselves to the Baháʼí religion.

Seals And Crofts reunited a few times after that, and recorded a new album called Traces in 2004. Seals moved to Nashville and mostly retired from music. He did perform his brother Dan Seals a few times as Seals And Seals. Dan Seals was one-half of fellow soft-rockers England Dan & John Ford Coley and also had a prolific country career. Coley shared a tribute to Jim Seals on his Facebook page, writing: “I spent a large portion of my musical life with this man. We toured together, he and Dash invited us to sing on Seals and Crofts records, and we played with him for years … 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 belonged to a group that was one of a kind.”