Singer-songwriter and Upper Darby native Jim Croce died in a plane crash in 1973 at, what was arguably, the height of his popularity.
He was coming off a No. 1 single (“Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”) and about to release a new album and the song “I Got a Name.”
Croce was a staple on the radio all over the country and, to this day, is remembered as one of the greatest American musicians of all time.
That’s kind of a big shadow his son A.J. Croce was stepping into when he started plotting his own path in the music industry.
“To be the son or daughter of a well-known artist is tricky,” said A.J. “You really don’t get to have an identity of your own. There’s no way that the outside world can separate you from them. So, when someone’s listening to you, they can’t stop to listen to you completely. It’s nearly impossible. They’re listening to you, but there’s some sort of connection to someone else. It’s hard to be an individual, which is what I really felt like I needed to be.”
While his father’s music was always a part of his life, A.J. took advice from other musicians and forged his own path.
“The first 30 years of my career, I was trying to do my best to separate myself in my music,” Croce said. “There were a lot of people that were encouraging me to do what I did.”
Around 2012, Croce started playing more of his father’s music. His latest tour, Croce Plays Croce, will be at the Circus Maximus Theater at Caesars in Atlantic City Nov. 22. Tickets are available at ticketmaster.com.
“From an early age, people were offering a lot of money to do his stuff, but there was no integrity in it and that my heart wasn’t in it.” said Croce. “I began working on the publishing side of music in the late ’90s. I was cataloging some of his music and I felt I could really contribute to his musical legacy behind the scenes. I felt I could be helpful making young people aware or just people in general aware of his music.
“There was a time in the early 2000s where I was archiving some of his music and I heard this tape of him playing, practicing for what would’ve been like just a coffee house gig. It was all of this music that I had played. I had never heard him play these songs. It was really eerie. I heard him singing these really obscure songs that I had played since I was 13 or 14 years old. Like, ‘You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew’ by Fat Waller, and Pink Anderson songs. I mean one song after another was like hearing something magical. It was like I made a friend. This person had the same taste in music as I did.
“It was like the actual songs. It wasn’t just Fats Waller or Bessie Smith or John Hurt or Skip James, it was the actual songs that we had the same exact choice for one reason or another. That was kind of the catalyst, the first catalyst of like recognizing there was a way to put this show together that was a little deeper, more interesting to me.”
Croce not only plays his father’s music, but he mixes in his own songs for an interesting mix of old and new.
The road hasn’t been an easy one for A.J. Croce, though.
He was born in 1971 while the family was living in Upper Darby. Within a couple of years, they had moved to San Diego. Soon after the move his father was killed in the plane crash.
Suffering the abuse of a caretaker, Croce at the age of 6 was hospitalized for six months and was totally blind in both eyes for six years. That’s when he started playing the piano, inspired by the music of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.
“From the time I could crawl, I was crawling up to the piano at my grandmother’s house in Philadelphia,” Croce said. “We had an upright when I was a kid and a baby grand when I was a little bit older. I would just go and it was my solace.”
At the age of 15, the family house burned down and, with it, all of his father’s albums. At 16, Croce started recording on his own.
“I started touring when I was 16 with Floyd Dixon,” said Croce. “We played a bunch of drinking songs. Then Willie Nelson took me under his wing and Ray Charles and Jim Kelner and so many other folks.”
Now, Croce has come full circle.
“This tour is more than a tribute to my father and more than a showcase of my own music, it’s the meeting of my roots and a declaration of my individual artistry,” Croce said. “This is a journey through soul and sound.”
