Sunday, November 18

JIM CROCE

A voice and sound from my very early youth -- 1972-1975 (or thereabouts). JIM CROCE was a working-class singer-songwriter whose compositions benefited from a dichotomy of earthy acoustic guitar and lush backing strings.

Croce's legacy -- like James Dean's -- would be deeply impacted by the nature and timing of his death. While Dean was killed in a car crash at age 24 less than a month before the release of his second film, "Rebel Without a Cause," Croce perished in a plane crash on January 20, 1973 -- less than a month before the release of his album, I GOT A NAME. He was 30 years old.

(The tracks "I Got a Name" and "I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song" appear on the aforementioned posthumous album.)

[
MP3] "I Got a Name"

[
MP3] "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)"

[
MP3] "I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song"

[
MP3] "Time in a Bottle"

[
MP3] "These Dreams"

[
MP3] "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown"

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Big favourite of my brother all those years ago. Nice post.

T. Carter said...

I went to university in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and from my dorm room window to see the general area where Jim's plane went down. My dad had always been a fan of his music, so I heard a lot of it while growing up, but didn't really connect where I went to school with him until someone pointed it out to me ...

Anonymous said...

Jim actually died in the plane crash on September 20, 1973.