Born 79 Years Ago Today in Tennessee, the Hitmaking Songwriter Who Gave the Masters Its Iconic Theme Song and Had a Famous Rock Star Cousin

On this day (November 10) in 1947, David Allen Loggins was born in Mountain City, Tennessee. If his last name sounds familiar, it’s because he shares it with second cousin Kenny Loggins, of “Footloose” and “Danger Zone” fame. But Dave Loggins was an established singer-songwriter in his own right, best known for the Grammy-nominated 1974 smash hit “Please Come to Boston” and “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do”, his 1984 duet with Anne Murray.

Additionally, if you’re fond of golf, you’ll be quite familiar with Loggins’ composition “Augusta”. He wrote the song while visiting the Augusta National Golf Club in 1981. Every year since, “Augusta” has heralded CBS’ coverage of the annual Masters Golf Tournament — earning the title of longest-running sports theme in broadcasting history, per Music Row.

On July 10, 2024, Dave Loggins died at age 76 in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, we’re taking a trip through his life and career in honor of what would have been his 79th birthday.

Dave Loggins Had Some “Hard” Years in Nashville

Dave Loggins grew up immersed in country music in his tiny East Tennessee mountain town, just three square miles long with a population of little more than 1,000 people.

His father was a country fiddle player, and Loggins started playing guitar and writing his own songs in high school.

With the goal of eventually playing music professionally, he initially made his living first as a draftsman at a metal company, then as an insurance salesman. In 1970, he moved to Nashville armed with nothing but his guitar and a notebook brimming with original songs.

However, Loggins initially found it difficult to find space for his soft, acoustic style — not unlike that of James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg — in the country music capital of the world.

“Nashville was hard, because if you didn’t have country tunes, people didn’t want to hear it,” Loggins later said, per his Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame bio. (He was inducted in 1995.) “I spent a couple of hard years there.”

Finding Long-Awaited Success

In February 1972, Dave Loggins released his debut album, Personal Belongings, through Vanguard Records. While it did little commercially, the self-penned ballad “Pieces of April” would become a top 20 rock hit for Three Dog Night in January of the following year.

In 1974, Loggins’ sophomore album, Apprentice (In a Musical Workshop), produced the Top 5 pop hit “Please Come to Boston”, which also spent a week at No. 1 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart and snagged a Grammy nod for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

Loggins wrote the song during a 1972 tour with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which made stops in each city named in the song — Boston, Denver and Los Angeles.

“The story is almost true, except there wasn’t anyone waiting {here} so I made her up. In effect, making the longing for someone stronger,” Loggins later recalled. “It was a recap to my first trip to each of those cities and out of innocence. That was how I saw each one. The fact of having no one to come home to made the chorus easy to write. Some 40 years later, I still vividly remember that night, and it was as if someone else was writing the song.”

Reinventing Himself

While Dave Loggins never again found mainstream success as a solo recording artist, he would re-emerge as a country music songwriter. In the 1980s and 1990s, he enjoyed a string of chart-topping country hits recorded by Alabama, Don Williams, Restless Heart, Reba McEntire, Gary Morris and Wynonna Judd.

[RELATED: Remember When Dave Loggins Wrote a Song for Alabama?]

In 1984, he reached No. 1 on the U.S. country charts with the Anne Murray duet “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do”, which earned the pair a 1985 CMA Vocal Duo of the Year Award.

Throughout his career, Dave Loggins picked up 25 ASCAP Awards, including 1987’s Songwriter of the Year.

Featured image by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images