Five albums, one plane, and songs that kept charting

Jim Croce was born in South Philadelphia in 1943, to Italian American parents whose families had come from Abruzzo. He grew up in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, and studied at Villanova University, where he sang with campus groups, worked as a student disc jockey and graduated in 1965 with a degree in social studies. He did not take music seriously until Villanova, where he led the Villanova Singers and played at fraternity parties, coffeehouses and universities around Philadelphia, performing whatever the crowd wanted to hear.

His band was chosen for a foreign exchange tour that took in Africa, the Middle East and Yugoslavia. In 1963, judging a hootenanny at the Philadelphia Convention Hall, he met his future wife, Ingrid Jacobson. In 1966 he released his first album, Facets, paid for by a $500 wedding gift from his parents, who hoped its failure would push him toward a more traditional career. Instead every copy sold.

For several years he worked odd jobs to pay the bills while writing and recording. The change came when he formed a partnership with guitarist Maury Muehleisen in the early 1970s. His third album, You Don’t Mess Around with Jim, appeared in 1972 and produced three charting singles, including “Time in a Bottle”, which reached number one after his death. The follow-up, Life and Times, included “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”, the only number one he had during his lifetime.

On 20 September 1973 Croce, Muehleisen and four others died in a plane crash, one day before the release of “I Got a Name”, the lead single from his fifth album. It was a period of significant commercial success, and his music kept charting through the rest of the decade. Ingrid continued to write and record, and their son A.J. became a singer-songwriter in the 1990s. “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song” is a fitting reminder: a man who meant what he sang, and was understood.