Epitaph for Jim

For Pop Singer Jim Croce, the touring life meant mostly one small college campus after another. When he was killed at age 30 last September in Natchitoches, La., he was doing what he had done many times before--taking off at night in a light plane from a small airstrip. Croce then was regarded as just another pop singer with a couple of hits to his credit, notably Bad, Bad Leroy Brown ("Badder than old King Kong And meaner than a junkyard dog"). But the pop woods are full of singer-composers who have momentary success and are never heard from again. In Croce's case, few ever dreamed he was capable of superstardom.

Now, in a burst of discovery, the U.S. record-buying public is making it up to Croce. You Don't Mess Around with Jim (ABC Records), his first solo LP, has tripled its sales since his death and has just jumped past the 1 million mark. Last week it was No. 1 on Billboard's chart of bestselling LPs. Croce also occupied the No. 2 position with I Got a Name, recorded only a week before his death. As if that were not enough, at No. 22 was a third Croce album, Life and Times (released in January 1973). Sales like that are enough to turn the fortunes of almost any record company around --which indeed has happened to the languishing ABC Records.

Is the Croce boom based on anything more than morbid or cult curiosity? The answer is yes. Croce had the gift to sing evocatively about a genuine slice of life: the young working class of Middle America. It was a milieu he knew firsthand, having left it only at an age when most pop stars are either fading or forever gone.

Croce was anything but a prodigy. He was born in Philadelphia in January 1943. Music did not really interest him seriously until his days at Villanova University, but even then he took a degree in psychology (1965) and spent much of the time thereafter doing construction work and driving trucks. In Speedball Tucker, Croce fantasizes about the life on the open road in a broken-down rig:

You know the rain may blow

The snow may snow

The turnpikes they may freeze

But they don't bother ole Speedball

He goin 'any damn way he please.

When he took his blue collar off it was to try to make it in the music business. New York's Not My Home tells about the period in 1968 and 1969 when he and his wife Ingrid were dogging the campus and coffeehouse trail as a duo:

Lived there 'bout a year and I never

once felt at home

I thought I'd make the big time

I learned a lot of lessons awful quick.

Giving it up, Jim and Ingrid settled down in 1970 in Lyndell, Pa., where their son Adrian, now two, was born. One by one, Croce sold the guitars he had accumulated, and when the guitars were gone, he went back into construction work. Occasionally he got studio jobs in New York, "mostly background 'oohs' and 'aahs' for commercials," he once recalled. "I kept thinking, maybe tomorrow I'll sing some words."

The words the world knows Jim Croce by today were delivered in a blunt, nasal tenor that matched their verismo style. His tight melodies, a blend of folk, blues and white pop, warmed and suited those words the way shoes do socks. He was about the same onstage as off --a lean, needling, fun-poking man in work boots and work shirts whose long, sad face and broad mustache gave him, at least for some of his older fans, a Saroyanesque look. He took a mad kind of joy in the commonplace, and tomorrow was always the best of all possible times:

Hey tomorrow you 've gotta believe

that

I'm through wastin ' what's left of me

'Cause night is fallin 'and the dawn

is callin'

I'll have a new day if she 11 have me.

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