Seals Family Rankin Texas

Upton County, Texas

"England Dan" Seals

Danny Wayland Seals (February 8, 1948 – March 25, 2009) was an American musician. In the 1970s, he was the "England Dan" half of the soft rock duo England Dan and John Ford Coley, who are best known for their hit singles "Love Is the Answer" and "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight". He was also the younger brother of Jim Seals from the duo Seals & Crofts.

After England Dan & John Ford Coley disbanded, Seals began a solo career in country music. In his solo career, he released sixteen studio albums and charted more than twenty singles on the country charts. Eleven of his singles reached Number One: "Meet Me in Montana" (with Marie Osmond), "Bop" (also a #42 pop hit), "Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold)", "You Still Move Me", "I Will Be There", "Three Time Loser", "One Friend", "Addicted", "Big Wheels in the Moonlight", "Love on Arrival", and a cover of Sam Cooke's "Good Times". Five more of Seals' singles also reached Top Ten on the country charts.

Jim Seals " Seals & Crofts"

Seals and Crofts are Jim Seals (born James Seals, October 17, 1941, Sidney, Texas) and Dash Crofts (born Darrell Crofts, August 14, 1940, Cisco, Texas). The soft rock duo was one of the most successful musical acts of the 1970s. They are best-known for their hits "Summer Breeze" and "Diamond Girl". Seals' younger brother, Dan Seals was also well known as one half of the successful soft rock band in the same time period, England Dan and John Ford Coley, as well as a very successful country artist in the mid-1980s.

Seals' Story revolves around music learned in home success

E.W. "Waylon" Seals

RANKIN, Texas (AP) - A pinch of Tennessee music, sifted through the hands of retired Rankin oilfield worker E.W. "Waylon" Seals, got three of Seals sons on the music business track. Two internationally reputed musical groups. Seals and Crofts and England Dan and John Ford Colev have their roots in the West Texas oil patch. Waylon Seals came to Texas in 1919 with his parents, Fred and Eunice Seals, "because there was work in the oil fields." The family's musical talents were saved for evenings on the porch at Rankin Playing music was a kind of relief from the back-breaking oil patch labor. Like most country music success stories, the Seals' story revolves around music learned in the home. "My dad was a banjo man when he lived back in Big Sandy — that's in Benton County, Tenn " said the 71-year-old Waylon Seals. "He taught me what I know about music. My boys learned from us and taught themselves." Danny Seals, at 35 the youngest of those three sons was born at McCamey in 1948. He lives today at Hendersonville, Tenn. Dubbed "England Dan" at the beginning of his musical career by his older brother Jim, Danny Seals teamed with Dallas musician Coley and the match lasted for 15 years. The duo's list of hits recorded during the 1970s is impressive. Jim Seals, who now lives in Costa Rica, was born in Comanche County at Sidney on Oct. 17, 1942. He began playing music at the age of 4 and, by high school, played several instruments well. Jim Seals and his musical partner Dash Crofts, of Cisco, met in junior high school. They released their first album in 1968. Since then, six of 12 albums went gold (sold 500,000 copies), and three went platinum (sold million copies). Eddie Ray Seals was born in 1934 at Gorman. Waylon Seals and his wife were living at Iraan, where Waylon Seals and his father had found work in the oilfield. Eddie Ray Seals, the only one of Waylon Seals' three boys who doesn't count on music for his living, will be 50 next year. While his livelihood comes from his work as a real estate investor in his home town of Hendersonville, Tenn., he still plays music regularly.

Waylon Seals still loves to play music, but arthritis makes fretting his favorite old Gibson six-string flattop harder than before. "I still play guitar, but just enough to get along " said Waylon Seals, his thinning hair still jet black and cropped in a burr. "I'm not near as slick as I used to be. But it's like riding a bicycle. You always remember how to stay on the thing, once you learn, but as you get older you just can't pedal as fast. "That oldest boy of mine, Eddie Ray, he can flat play a guitar. He's always done his own show, up in Dallas, out in Las Vegas or now in Nashville," said his father. "Jim won the state fiddle championship when he was 9 years old," Waylon Seals said during a recent chat at his kitchen table. "They wouldn't let Jim play saxophone in the Rankin High School Band because he couldn't read music," said Waylon Seals, but Jim Seals played his self-taught sax well enough in 1958 that country music legend Gene Autrey, who heard the boy at age 15 on an audition tape, sent his promoter to Big Lake to sign Jim Seals to a contract with "The Champs " Autrey's band. "Then, the youngest, Danny, used to play a big ol' bull fiddle with the rest of us, (Waylon Seals, Jim Seals and Crofts). "We all played on a television show one time in the 50s and people in the audience got the biggest kick out of watching Danny. He was so little that he'd have to jump clean off his feet to reach some of them low notes way up on that fiddle neck. He was only 4 or 5 years old then," Waylon Seals recalled with a chuckle. Waylon Seals and his mother Eunice, 89 and a widow since 1964, live together in a modest frame house in the middle of Rankin. It's the house his three boys left and, said Mrs. Seals, it's the place they like to come home to. The pair has lived there for more than 25 years, said Waylon Seals. Though the sons are spread all over the country, Seals counts himself lucky to have them. He keeps careful track of their successes and when visitors call at the Seals home, music and the boys are the topics of conversation. "I had an old Gibson guitar with red rosewood sides and a yellow sunburst top. My daddy gave it to me in the *30s," Waylon Seals recalled. "I wore it out, had it fixed and wore it out again and had it fixed again Then I gave it to Eddie Ray. He still has it, and he still plays it, too. Galveston Daily News | Galveston, Texas | Sunday, January 01, 1984 | Page 21