Journeyman rock musician Russell DaShiell was born July 23, 1947, in Philadelphia, PA, the son of Daniel Harrison DaShiell, a radio electronics engineer, and Francis (Wolfe) DaShiell. The family moved to the island of Oahu, HI, when DaShiell was three years old, and he lived there until he was 15. His first musical instrument was the ukulele, but when he was 14 he heard a neighbor playing guitar and found it a life-changing experience. Although he never took lessons, the guitar became his passion, and he learned to play by ear while listening to records and the radio, his early influences including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and the Ventures, and later the Beatles, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix. In 1963, his family moved to Florida, and there, while attending high school, he formed his first band, the Beau Gentry. In addition to DaShiell on guitar and vocals, it featured Doug Killmer on bass and vocals, and Rick Jaeger on drums. After graduating from high school in 1965, DaShiell attended junior college locally for a year before transferring to Wisconsin State University, but eventually dropped out to be a full-time musician.

After playing in the Midwest for two years, the Beau Gentry changed their name to Crowfoot and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in December 1968 in hopes of securing a record deal. Despite numerous local gigs including the Fillmore West, that deal was not forthcoming, however, and the three musicians took session work and backup jobs to make ends meet. DaShiell played on the self-titled album by A.B. Skhy in 1969; DaShiell and Jaeger joined the band of former Canned Heat guitarist Harvey Mandel and DaShiell played on Mandel's album Games Guitars Play; and, DaShiell and Killmer played on Norman Greenbaum's album Spirit in the Sky, the title song from which hit number three on the Billboard Hot 100 (number one in Cash Box) in April 1970 and went gold. With the success of Spirit in the Sky, DaShiell toured with Greenbaum; he also appeared on Greenbaum's follow-up albums Back Home Again (1972) and Petaluma (1973). Also, he was able to get a record deal with ABC-Paramount Records for Crowfoot. But, while it featured Jaeger on drums, the first, self-titled Crowfoot album released in September 1970 was in essence a DaShiell solo album, as was its follow-up, Find the Sun, released a year later.

By 1971, DaShiell had relocated to the Los Angeles area, where he worked as a backup musician to Phil Everly, Danny O'Keefe, and Bo Diddley, and did sessions, notably appearing on John Sebastian's album Tarzana Kid (1974) and former Creedence Clearwater Revival member Tom Fogerty's Myopia (1975). The Fogerty album also featured the former Creedence rhythm section of bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford, and DaShiell joined with them and singer Don Harrison to form the Don Harrison Band. The group signed to Atlantic and released a self-titled album in April 1976 that made the charts, followed by a second album, Red Hot, in January 1977, by which time they had disbanded. DaShiell, however, got a contract as a solo artist with Epic Records, leading to the release of his debut solo album, Elevator, in March 1978.

DaShiell was involved in various musical projects during the 1980s, including a single under the name I Spy released in the Scandinavian countries on Sonet Records. Toward the end of the decade, he began working in television, composing music and doing audio editing, notably for the series #In Living Color. He quit TV in the early '90s and re-formed the original Crowfoot lineup with Killmer and Jaeger for an EP called Messenger that he released on his own label, Aerial View, in 1994. He kept writing and recording his own music while also working for advertising agencies during the rest of the ‘90s. Late in the decade he began working on a concept called #Foreverland Forest, first intended as a CD-ROM, then as a book with music, and finally as an animated feature film. In 2000, he moved back to Hawaii, where he continued working on #Foreverland Forest and a new instrumental solo album, Island Life. By the mid-2000s, he was back in California with his own website, spiritguitar.com, planning to market both Island Life and an album of songs from #Foreverland Forest online. The digital albums Island Life and It's a Lonely Life became available as downloads later in the decade. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi