Dan Fogelberg

Daniel Grayling Fogelberg was born in Peoria on 13 August 1951, the youngest of three sons of Margaret Fogelberg, a classically trained pianist, and Lawrence Fogelberg, a band director at Woodruff High School in Peoria, at Pekin Community High School and at Bradley University; his 1981 “Leader of the Band” was written for his father. Using a Mel Bay course book, he taught himself to play a Hawaiian slide guitar that his grandfather had given him, and he also learned piano. At fourteen he joined a Beatles cover band, the Clan, and his next band, the Coachmen, released a single of two of his own songs in 1967.

After graduating from Woodruff High School in 1969 he studied theater arts and painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and played solo at a coffeehouse there, the Red Herring. Irving Azoff, who became his longtime manager, sent him to Nashville, where he worked as a session musician and recorded his first album, Home Free (Columbia, 1972), with the producer Norbert Putnam. Its follow-up, Souvenirs (Full Moon/Epic, 1974), was produced by Joe Walsh, who played on ten of its eleven tracks. It includes “Morning Sky” and his first hit, “Part of the Plan,” reached No. 17 on the Billboard 200 and was certified double platinum.

A run of gold and platinum albums followed, among them Captured Angel (1975) and Nether Lands (1977). Twin Sons of Different Mothers (1978) was the first of two albums with the jazz flutist Tim Weisberg. Phoenix (1979) reached the top ten, and its “Longer” was a No. 2 pop hit in 1980. The double album The Innocent Age (1981) contained four of his biggest hits: “Same Old Lang Syne,” “Hard to Say,” “Leader of the Band” and “Run for the Roses.”

High Country Snows (Full Moon/Epic, 1985) was recorded at the Bennett House in Franklin, Tennessee. It opens with a short version of Flatt and Scruggs’s “Down the Road,” and its core band had Fogelberg on guitar and lead vocals, Herb Pedersen on banjo and harmony vocals, David Grisman on mandolin, Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Jim Buchanan on fiddle, Emory Gordy Jr. on bass and Russ Kunkel on drums. Doc Watson played guitar on “Wolf Creek,” Chris Hillman played mandolin on the title song, and Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill sang on some tracks. Fogelberg described the record as “life in the off-ramp.”

His later albums included Exiles (1987), The Wild Places (1990), River of Souls (1993), his last studio album for Sony, the Christmas album The First Christmas Morning (1999) and Full Circle (2003). He died at his home on Deer Isle, Maine, on 16 December 2007, at the age of 56. Love in Time, a collection of eleven unreleased songs, came out in 2009. In 2017 he was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, the year a tribute album with Joe Walsh and the Eagles, Garth Brooks, Vince Gill and others was released.