Jim Croce

Jim Croce
Background information
Birth name	James Joseph Croce
Born	January 10, 1943(1943-01-10), South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	September 20, 1973(1973-09-20) (aged 30), Natchitoches, Louisiana, U.S.
Genres	Folk Folk rock Pop
Occupations	Singer-songwriter
Instruments	Guitar, Vocals
Years active	1966–1973
Labels	Capitol/EMI Records ABC Records Saja/Atlantic Records

James Joseph "Jim" Croce (pronounced /ˈkroʊtʃi/; January 10, 1943 – September 20, 1973) was an American singer-songwriter. Between 1966 and 1973, Croce released five studio albums and 11 singles. His singles "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and "Time in a Bottle" were both number one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

Biography

Early life

Croce was born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 10, 1943, to Jim and Flora Croce, and grew up in a family of Italian background. Croce took a strong interest in music at a young age. At five, he learned to play his first song on the accordion, "Lady of Spain."

Croce attended Upper Darby High School in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. After his graduation in 1960, Croce went to Malvern Preparatory School for one year before deciding to enroll at Villanova University in 1961. During his time as a student, Croce became a member of the Villanova Singers and the Spires. When the Spires performed off-campus gigs or made professional recordings, it was under the name, "The Coventry Lads". Jim was also a student disc jockey at WKVU.

Croce did not take music seriously other than as a hobby until his time at Villanova, where he formed various bands, performing at fraternity parties, coffee houses, and at universities around Philadelphia, playing "anything that the people wanted to hear: blues, rock, a cappella, railroad music... anything." One of those bands was chosen for a foreign exchange tour of Africa and the Middle East. Croce later said of the experience that "we just ate what the people ate, lived in the woods, and played our songs. Of course they didn't speak English over there but if you mean what you're singing, people understand."

Croce met his future wife Ingrid Jacobson at this time during a hootenanny at Philadelphia Convention Hall where he was judging a contest.

Early career

From the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Croce performed with his wife as a duo. At first, their performances included songs by artists such as Ian and Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, and Woody Guthrie, but in time, they began writing their own music. During this time, Croce got his first long-term gig at a rural bar and steak house in Lima, Pennsylvania, called "The Riddle Paddock". His set list included every genre from blues to country to rock 'n roll to folk.

In 1968, Jim and Ingrid Croce were encouraged by record producer Tommy West to move to New York City. The couple spent time in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx and recorded their first album with Capitol Records. During the next two years, they drove more than 300,000 miles, playing small clubs and concerts on the college concert circuit promoting their album Jim & Ingrid Croce.

Becoming disillusioned by the music business specifically and New York City in general, they sold all but one guitar to pay the rent and returned to the Pennsylvania countryside where Jim got a job driving trucks and doing construction to pay the bills while continuing to write songs, often about the characters he would meet at the local bars and truck stops.

The couple returned to Philadelphia and Jim decided to be "serious" about becoming a productive member of society. But it was hard to make a living playing in a band, and his previous employment experiences had lost their appeal. "I'd worked construction crews, and I'd been a welder while I was in college. But I'd rather do other things than get burned," he would later say. His determination to be "serious" led to a job at a Philadelphia R&B AM radio station, WHAT, where he translated commercials into "soul". "I'd sell airtime to Bronco's Poolroom and then write the spot: "You wanna be cool, and you wanna shoot pool... dig it." Increasingly frustrated, he quit to teach guitar at a summer camp and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He did not have a very illustrious military career but said he would be prepared if "there's ever a war where we have to defend ourselves with mops".

Success

In 1970, Croce met the classically trained pianist/guitarist and singer-songwriter Maury Muehleisen from Trenton, New Jersey through producer Joe Salviuolo (aka Sal Joseph). Salviuolo had been friends with Croce when they attended Villanova University together, and Salviuolo later discovered Muehleisen when he was teaching at Glassboro State College in New Jersey. Salviuolo brought the Croce and Muehleisen duo together at the production office of Tommy West and Terry Cashman in New York City. Initially, Croce backed Muehleisen on guitar at his gigs but in time their roles reversed, with Muehleisen adding lead guitar to Croce's down-to-earth music.

In 1972, Croce signed to a three-record deal with ABC Records and released two albums, You Don't Mess Around with Jim and Life and Times. The singles "You Don't Mess Around with Jim", "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)", and "Time in a Bottle" (written for his then-unborn son, A. J. Croce) all received airplay. Croce's biggest single, "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown", hit #1 on the American charts in July 1973.

Death

On September 20, 1973, the day that his ABC single "I Got a Name" was released, Croce, Muehleisen, and four others were killed in the crash of a chartered Beechcraft E18S upon takeoff from the Natchitoches Regional Airport in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Croce had just completed a concert at Northwestern State University's Prather Coliseum in Natchitoches and was flying to Sherman, Texas, for a concert at Austin College, when the plane crashed about an hour after the end of the concert.

According to results of an investigation, upon takeoff the plane did not gain enough altitude to clear, and the pilot did not maneuver to avoid a pecan tree at the end of the runway, which investigators said was the only tree for hundreds of yards. The flight conditions were reported as dark, clear sky, calm winds, and over five miles of visibility with haze. The official report from the NTSB lists the probable cause as pilot failure to see and avoid objects or obstructions with factors of pilot physical impairment and fog obstructing vision. The report remarks that the 57-year-old charter pilot had just run about three miles to the airport from a motel and suffered a heart attack. The pilot had an ATP Certificate, 14,290 hours total flight time and 2,190 hours in the Beech 18 type. A later investigation, source unknown, placed sole blame for the accident on pilot error due to his downwind takeoff into a "black hole".

Croce is buried at Haym Salomon Cemetery in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Muehleisen is buried at Saint Mary's Cemetery in Trenton, New Jersey.

Legacy

The album I Got a Name was released on December 1, 1973. Croce had just finished recording the album just over a week before his death. The posthumous release included three hits: "Workin' at the Car Wash Blues", "I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song", and the title song, which had been used as the theme to the film The Last American Hero which was released two months prior to his death. The album reached #2 and "I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song" reached #9 on the singles chart.

The song "Time in a Bottle" had been featured over the opening and closing credits and during a scene in which Desi Arnaz Jr. is opening the 'Don't Mess Around With Jim' album in the ABC made-for-television movie She Lives!, which aired on September 12, 1973, That appearance had generated significant interest in Croce and his music in the week just prior to the plane crash. That, combined with the news of the death of the singer, sparked a renewed interest in Croce's previous albums. Consequently, three months later, "Time in a Bottle", originally released on Croce's first album the year before, hit number-one on December 29, 1973, the third posthumous chart-topping song of the rock era following Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" and Janis Joplin's recording of "Me and Bobby McGee".

A greatest hits package entitled Photographs & Memories, released in 1974, proved to be extraordinarily popular. Later posthumous releases have included Home Recordings: Americana, Facets, Jim Croce: Classic Hits, Down the Highway, and DVD and CD releases of Croce's television performances, Have You Heard: Jim Croce Live.

Croce's catalog became a staple of radio play for years, and still receives significant airplay on a variety of radio formats into the second decade of the 21st century. In 1990, Croce was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Jim and Ingrid Croce's son Adrian James Croce was born September 28, 1971, and is now an accomplished singer-songwriter, musician, and pianist, performing under the name A.J. Croce, as well as serving as the owner/operator of his own record label, Seedling Records.

Ingrid Croce owns and manages Croce's Restaurant & Jazz Bar---a project she and Jim had jokingly discussed a decade earlier---in the historic Gaslamp Quarter in downtown San Diego. She opened the business in 1985.

Discography

Main article: Jim Croce discography

External links

• Jim Croce Official Website
• Croce's Restaurant & Jazz Bar
• NTSB Identification: FTW74AF017; 14 CFR Part 135 Nonscheduled operation of ROBERT AIRWAYS; Aircraft: BEECH E18S, registration: N50JR (Report). NTSB.gov. 1973-09-20. http://ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=84416&key=0&print=1. Retrieved 2011-11-27.  - US NTSB Report on plane crash
• "Wall of Fame". Upper Darby High School. Archived from the original on October 9, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071009225810/http://www.udsd.k12.pa.us/alumni/wof.php. Retrieved October 17, 2007. 
• Seedling Records - A.J. Croce's Record Label
• Jim Croce at Find a Grave
• Jim Croce at VH1