NEW YORK, NY.- Dave Loggins, a chart-topping Nashville songwriter for the likes of Kenny Rogers and the Oak Ridge Boys who also notched his own Top 10 pop hit with the wistful “Please Come to Boston” and wrote the enduring theme for the Masters golf tournament, died July 10 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 76.
His death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by his son, Kyle, who did not specify the cause.
Loggins, a second cousin of pop star Kenny Loggins, released five albums as a solo artist in the 1970s, but he scored only one hit single himself.
“Please Come to Boston,” a soft-rock weeper about a rambling man trying to woo a lover to follow him as he chases his dreams in one city after another, climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s easy listening chart and No. 5 on the magazine’s Hot 100 in 1974. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for best pop vocal performance by a male artist — the first of Loggins’ four Grammy nominations.
For Loggins, the song almost seemed to have divine origins. In a 2021 interview with singer-songwriter and vocal coach Judy Rodman on the podcast “All Things Vocal,” he said he wrote the song early in his career “with chords I had never even played before.”
“There was this beautiful, glowing feeling that came over me,” he added, “a godlike feeling, that said, ‘Here, go ahead and play, I’ll move your fingers.’”
While “Please Come to Boston” was his only mainstream hit, Loggins was considered anything but a one-hit wonder in country music circles: He wrote hits for Willie Nelson, Tanya Tucker, Wynonna Judd and Toby Keith, among others.
In the 1980s and ’90s, he had a string of No. 1 country singles, including Alabama’s “Roll On (Eighteen Wheeler)” (1984), Kenny Rogers’ “Morning Desire” (1985) and the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Everyday,” (1986), which Loggins wrote with J.D. Martin.
He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1995 and was named the music licensing organization ASCAP’s songwriter of the year for 1987.
Although he spent much of his career as a “reclusive genius” songwriter, as Rodman put it on her podcast, Loggins again basked in the limelight in 1984 with “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do,” a duet with Anne Murray, written by James Dunne and Pamela Phillips-Oland. The recording won a Country Music Association Award for vocal duo of the year.
This made him the only artist not signed to a major label to win a CMA Award, according to Billboard. The song also hit No. 1 on the Billboard country singles chart.
David Allen Loggins was born Nov. 10, 1947, in Shady Valley, Tennessee. He was the youngest of Eugene and Pauline (Sluder) Loggins’ four children.
Growing up in Bristol, a small town in the mountains of east Tennessee, he was influenced by his father, who played country fiddle. Loggins purchased his first guitar and began to write songs while in high school. After graduating in 1965, he attended East Tennessee State University, but he left to pursue a music career.
In 1970, he moved to Nashville, where he worked as an insurance salesman during the week and hustled up club gigs on the weekend.
He struggled to make a dent in the music capital, where many found his early songs not country enough. He finally made his own break one day by trudging with his guitar case down to the Capitol Records office, where he asked a secretary if there was anyone there who would listen to his songs.
“This guy heard me upstairs and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll listen to them,” he said on the podcast. Loggins played the man four songs. “He just went crazy,” he said.
The man steered Loggins to the office of Jerry Crutchfield of MCA Music Publishing, who signed him to an exclusive publishing agreement. He soon scored a recording deal with Vanguard Records.
The song “Pieces of April” — contained on his first album, “Personal Belongings,” released in 1972 — caught the attention of Chuck Negron of Three Dog Night, who heard it on an underground Los Angeles radio station and recorded it with his group. Their version made it to No. 19 on the Hot 100.
Loggins’ second album, “Apprentice (In a Musical Workshop),” released by Epic in 1974, spawned not only his biggest hit but also “Someday,” which made it to No. 57 on the Billboard chart. But he was unable to sustain his success as a solo artist, and he eventually reinvented himself as a songsmith for others.
Loggins was married and divorced three times. In addition to his son, Kyle, he is survived by two other sons, Quinn and Dylan, and a grandson.
Although not technically a hit, his Masters theme, “Augusta,” became perhaps his most ubiquitous song — although few golf fans could give its title or name its composer.
“Augusta” has been heard on the Masters telecast for more than four decades, making it “the longest-running sports theme in history,” according to Loggins' obituary in the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean. His original version contained lyrics (“It’s Amen Corner and it’s Hogan’s perfect swing”), but it was destined to live on for viewers as an elegiac piano-driven instrumental floating on a bed of lush strings.
The idea for the song came to him in 1981 while he was playing a round at the fabled fairways of the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters tournament.
“I stopped for a minute, looked up at the pine trees, and the wind down there was just different in some regards,” Loggins said in a 2019 interview with The Associated Press. “Spiritually it was different. That course was just a piece of art. I looked over at some dogwoods and, man, I just started writing the song in my head, which is what I do when I get inspired.”
He added, “I had the first verse before I even got off the course.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
