Hard Time Losing Man: A Jim Croce Retrospective

“Remember, it's the first sixty years that count and I've got 30 to go.”

-Jim

It’s been half a century since Ingrid Croce received those words in a letter from her husband, just days after he died. 50 years ago today, a small airplane carrying Jim Croce, Maury Muehleisen, and four others crashed during take-off, killing everyone inside instantly. A few days after learning of her husband’s death, Ingrid received a letter from him in the mail. Sometime before he had boarded the plane that was supposed to bring him one step closer to her, he penned the letter of a road-worn and weary man, beaten, tired, and missing his family. In the letter, Jim apologized for how he had sometimes treated Ingrid, he lamented the fact that he was constantly away, and expressed that he wished to be there - with his wife and son - and not be on the road any longer. Jim was done with that troubadour life, and had decided that when he got home this time, it would be for good. He never got the chance to fulfill his promise. After mailing the letter, he hopped on the plane in Natchitoches, heading to Texas for another gig. The plane never completed takeoff, crashing into a tree as it left the runway and killing everyone inside. Jim’s letter made its way to Ingrid a few days later.

Croce, leading up to his death, had for the first time been starting to see legitimate success in his career. He was making a splash in the folk music scene, with a few chart-topping hits like the upbeat, rugged and story-driven songs “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” and “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” or the contemplative and more poetically shaped “Time in a Bottle” and “Operator.” He was touring constantly, playing upwards of 300 shows a year, and was starting to get some long overdue recognition. But unlike many artists who had walked the same path, the money wasn’t coming along with the success. His label, ABC Records, wasn’t getting the cash into the right hands (according to his wife, Ingrid). Money was flowing - lots of it, approximately $10,000 per show, or $3 million a year - all the while Jim and Ingrid saw a measly stipend of just $200 per week. Jim was forced, at various points in his music career, to work as a long haul trucker on the side, work in construction, and even sell his guitar to pay the bills for his family. It’s a familiar story for far too many working musicians eaten up by the labels and by the industry at large. Contracts signed in inexperience by talented people with starry eyes set on fame give away the fruits of their labor for next to nothing. Ingrid saw the first $5000 check from Jim’s label after he was already dead.

“Once I had myself a million, now I've only got a dime,
The diff'rence don't seem quite as bad today.”

-Jim

Probably aided by the fact that he was indeed a working man, Jim Croce’s songs have always had an intense natural honesty that not many songwriters manage to achieve. When Croce writes songs about hard times, we know he’s had his fair share. When Croce writes about heartache, we know he’s felt it. From his music, you can tell that Jim felt everyday pain, not in an artistic, pining, lofty kind of way that so many rich and distant musicians use simply to serve as emotional inspiration - but the same way that you and I feel it. Jim Croce had life experience in his bones, and it came out in every song he wrote, from the personal tunes about his family, to the made up character stories. Jim Croce was entirely unpretentious, entirely real, entirely down to earth in a way not many singers (even folk singers) are. Listening to Jim Croce gives you the sense that you know him, personally. To an extent, this is true of all musicians - it’s part of the magic of music. But with Jim, it’s much more potent, less detached, realer. It’s probably why his music has endured the way it has, and still affects so many of us. I know the impact Jim Croce has had on me, and I know I’m not alone. Jim Croce was able to capture truths about life, cold hard truths about how it just ain’t fair, and observations about its beauty, through short and simple turns of phrase that cut right down to the marrow.

“Hey tomorrow, where are you goin'
Do you have some room for me
'Cause night is fallin' and the dawn is callin'
I'll have a new day if she'll have me”

-Jim

I can name moment after moment of my adolescence and young adulthood that were made infinitely more bearable by the mere hearing of one of Jim’s songs. I remember being 16, driving to a football game in my beat up pickup truck with the windows down, jamming out to “Bad Bad Leroy Brown.” I remember crying listening to “Time in a Bottle” as I remembered my grandfather singing it to my grandmother. I remember singing “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song”' to my silly little crush, when I was too scared to reveal my feelings to her at 17. She didn’t get the memo, but she liked the song. I remember the worst month of my life after a breakup being made just a little more bearable by humming the hook from “Walking Back to Georgia” when the waves of pain came in my day. I knew Jim had been there. He made it through, and he turned it into something beautiful. Maybe I could, too.

The day after Jim died, the lead single from his new album was released. “I Got a Name” is impossible to listen to without feeling the tragedy of the way Croce’s life ended, at the peak of his popularity. The single would go on to reach #10 on the Billboard Top 100.

A decade before all this, however, Croce’s life and career were very different. He spent his early years playing with his band at colleges around the nation, playing “whatever people wanted to hear.” Jim and his band had even toured the Middle East and Africa - an odd image of a distinctly and deeply American man playing his songs to crowds who primarily didn’t speak English. But Croce believed what so many others have voiced in history: that music serves as a universal language of sorts. “If you mean what you're singing, people understand," as Jim put it.

Croce’s blend of folk, rock, country, and blues has reverberated through the decades as an influence on countless songwriters. His friendly and relatable style coupled with his masterful lyrical ability garnered him admirers both contemporary and future. For souls like mine, there has never lived a greater songwriter than Jim. Through his music, myself and so many others feel a close kinship to a man who died before we were ever born - that’s what music can do.

“I was born to sing a good-time song.”

-Jim

In 1963, Jim met his future wife Ingrid while judging a hootenanny - which is such a hilariously perfect way for two folk singers to meet that it almost sounds made-up. 1966 was the year they were married, and was also the year Jim released his first album, thanks in part to the marriage itself. His parents gave him $500 as a wedding gift, insisting it be used to record an album. Jim, the ever-realistic, down to earth man he was, vowed to give up music if the album failed. For him, this would be his last shot at making it. Of course, the album sold every last copy of the 500 he printed. Back to the road, now with Ingrid in tow, to serenade America. Ingrid would later recall these years, singing alongside her husband night after night, as some of the best of her life.

Jim and Ingrid traveled together, sang together, wrote songs together, and lived together for those early years. It wasn’t until later they began to drift apart, and the strain on their marriage began to show. In the beginning, at least in retrospect, it was a free and magical time. In the early 1970s, things started to change. Jim met Maury Muehleisen, and Ingrid became pregnant with their son. Jim started getting the recognition he’d been waiting and working for, and with that came touring - apart from his family for most of the year. The path to the top wasn’t as lucrative as they’d hoped, and there were many stops in between those early days and where they ended up. For example: in 1968, when the two were still working for that elusive success, they moved to New York at the prodding of a friend and producer. New York was never their home, as Jim would famously sing, and it only served to disillusion them to the industry and to the grind. After New York failed them, the Croces moved to a small farm in Pennsylvania, selling everything but a single guitar. For years, Jim would work odd jobs to provide for his family where music had failed him. It was these crucial years that gave him fodder for some of his most iconic songs, meeting larger than life characters and living life as a working man. These years matured his songwriting into what made it so potent and relatable, they gave him the experiences he needed to make his ideas resonate with the average American.

The songs themselves stand today as a testament to Jim’s everyman genius, a clear demonstration of real, humble artistry. A Jim Croce song is almost always distinguishable from the opening guitar notes, even on a first listen. His unique guitar tone coupled with the masterful lead-picking of Mr. Muehleisen is instantly recognizable, and the texture of Croce’s comforting baritone voice carries through every tune. Jim’s songs were always simply arranged, not needing much more than a couple guitars, bass, drums, and sometimes soft piano to get his message through. When a song employed a string section it was always done beautifully and with great restraint, serving the melody and tone of the song, never taking over or demanding attention. The simplicity served the music, as the lack of complex arrangements forces the ear toward the melody, the lyrics, the craft of Croce’s songwriting. Croce was a master of many things, one of which being that he was the king of sneaky key changes, often switching from a minor key verse to a major key chorus, or vice versa, as seen in “Time in a Bottle” or “These Dreams.” Like any good folk singer, Croce had distinctive guitar licks and motifs that his fingers naturally tended toward, giving his style a unique character. While perhaps not often cited as a looming influence on later musicians’ sound to the same extent some other folk artists like Nick Drake or Bob Dylan are, Jim’s sound was just as distinct and recognizable - and for songwriters like me, there’s no other figure that gets channeled more than Jim.

“I've learned to take it well
I only wish my words could just convince myself
That it just wasn't real
But that's not the way it feels”

-Jim

When Jim died young, the tragedy was greatest, of course, for his widow. But the tragedy reached far and wide, rippling out into the wider world and bigger history. Perhaps the greatest unanswerable question for his fans, and those who have been shaped by his music decades later, is “what could have happened if he had lived?” For a folk musician of Croce’s talent, the music he left behind is a rather small collection compared to what a full career could have produced. Despite more and more demos and unreleased songs being released over time, it’s still a relatively small pool. Who could Jim have been had he lived and worked a full career? How many more timeless, beautiful songs would he have penned? Surely he would continue to write and play for pleasure, but if his final letter is any indication, he may have never recorded another album. How would his legacy be different if that plane hadn’t crashed? Jim’s son A.J. was 8 days away from his second birthday when his father died. A.J. has since followed in his father’s musical footsteps, becoming a talented musician and songwriter in his own right. He’s forged his own way in the music industry, writing songs, releasing albums, and operating a private record label. How would his path have been different if his father lived?

It’s been half a century since we lost Jim Croce. Jim was one of the best songwriters of the twentieth century, a wordsmith and poet, a composer and romantic, a realist and a storyteller. His songs have stood the test of time, his words have comforted millions, and his melodies have worked their way into popular culture year after year. Don McLean famously wrote American Pie as a tribute to “the day the music died,” the day that Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in 1959. To me though, the “day the music died” will always be September 20th, 1973. Another plane crash, less publicized, less lamented, but equally devastating to so many souls. The loss of life, the pain inflicted on family and friends, and the loss of a once in a generation talent, taken too soon. Jim didn’t live to get the recognition or fortune he deserved. But his music lives on - in the recordings and compositions he left behind, in his legacy, in his talented son, and in the Photographs and Memories we still treasure.

“But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do once you find them
I've looked around enough to know
That you're the one I want to go through time with.”

-Jim