Dave Loggins, Who Wrote Hits for Himself and Others, Dies at 76

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 on July 10 in Nashville. He was 76.

His death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by his son Kyle, who did not specify the cause.

Mr. Loggins, a second cousin of the 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 Mr. Loggins’s four Grammy nominations.

For Mr. Loggins, the song almost seemed to have divine origins. In a 2021 interview with the 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, Mr. 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.