For more than three decades, A.J. Croce deliberately built a musical identity separate from one of the most recognizable names in American singer-songwriter history.
The son of Jim Croce, whose remarkably brief professional career produced enduring songs including “Time in a Bottle,” “Operator,” “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” A.J. could easily have spent his career performing his father’s catalog. Instead, he followed his own musical path through blues, jazz, soul, rock and roots music.
Now, with Croce Plays Croce, those two musical worlds have finally come together.
“I’ve been asked to do it since I was a teenager and asked to record his music,” Croce recalled. “I just never felt like there was integrity in doing his stuff until I had an identity of my own as an artist.”
After establishing himself through decades of recording and touring, Croce reached a point where embracing his father’s music no longer felt like living in Jim Croce’s shadow. Instead, it filled in a missing piece of his own story.
“Once I had had some success, both chart success and just a career that was long enough and had matured enough to feel at home in my own skin and knowing who I am, I think it just felt good to embrace a part of myself that I had left out for so many years,” he said. “In a way, really, it made me feel whole as an artist.”
That connection extends far beyond performing his father’s hits.
For more than 30 years, A.J. quietly helped protect Jim Croce’s legacy behind the scenes, working with the catalog and helping ensure the music continued appearing in film and television. But one of the biggest catalysts for Croce Plays Croce came when A.J. began going through his father’s archival home recordings.
Among them was a tape of Jim rehearsing for a show. What A.J. heard stunned him.
Every song on the recording—from obscure Fats Waller and Bessie Smith material to old blues and jazz numbers—was music A.J. himself had been performing since he was 13 or 14.
“All of a sudden, I realized I had this friend that I didn’t know that I had,” he recalled. “And it was my father. And it was like this connection that we had that I didn’t know existed.”
It was an extraordinary discovery considering how little time father and son actually had together.
Jim Croce died in a plane crash in 1973 when A.J. was not yet two. For A.J., getting to know his father therefore happened largely through recordings—not only the famous records heard by millions, but more than 100 home tapes capturing Jim experimenting with everything from Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell to jazz, blues, rock, R&B and Sam Cooke.
Those recordings allowed A.J. to hear the evolution of Jim Croce the songwriter.
One tape in particular captured what A.J. describes almost as an artistic breakthrough. On one side, Jim was rehearsing other artists’ material for a coffeehouse performance. On the other was the beginning guitar line and first two verses of “Time in a Bottle.”
“It was like, out of the blue, he had gone from covering other people and writing songs that sounded like other people to being himself,” A.J. said.
Within roughly six months, he said, the songs that would make up Jim’s first two records had been written, including “Operator” and “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim.” Even more remarkable is just how compressed that success was.
“His professional career was only 18 months,” A.J. said.
Yet more than half a century later, those songs remain instantly recognizable.
A.J. believes part of their longevity comes from his father’s ability to transform ordinary people into unforgettable characters.
“He was able to make heroes out of everyday people,” Croce said. “I think that was what was so universal and why his music has lasted so long.”
Jim loved characters, A.J. explained. He sought out people with interesting stories because he instinctively understood that somewhere inside those encounters might be a song.
“These are people that you know,” A.J. said. “You ran across someone like this, or you saw someone like this, or you wanted to stay away from someone like this.”
That conversational storytelling is part of what separates Croce Plays Croce from a conventional tribute concert. Jim himself could spend much of a performance simply telling stories between songs, and A.J. knew storytelling needed to become a central component of his own show.
“He could play for two and a half hours and only play five or six songs,” A.J. said. “It was so much fun to listen to his shows because he was funny. He was really funny.”
A.J. also had no interest in simply reproducing his father’s records note for note.
Some songs are so beloved that he recognizes audiences want to hear something close to the originals. But even then, the voice and phrasing are unmistakably his own.
Other songs are fair game for reinvention.
A pianist first and guitarist second, A.J. sometimes moves his father’s guitar-based material to piano. “Car Wash Blues,” for example, gives him an opportunity to “turn it inside out” at the keyboard. Other songs may move from acoustic to electric guitar.
“Changing that a little bit allows the song to have a new life,” he explained. “The different tonality gives it a different sense of being.”
That approach helps explain why audiences expecting a quiet evening of 1970s nostalgia may be surprised by the energy of Croce Plays Croce.
For A.J., nostalgia may get people through the door, but it isn’t the ultimate purpose of the evening.
“I think [it’s] just the absolute joy of music and that we all have more in common than we have our differences,” he said. “Music is maybe the last place where we can all sit in a room together and not argue about something.”
Once the music begins, he wants Jim Croce’s songs to stop feeling like artifacts from another era.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s from a long time ago,” he said. “It feels present.”
That sense of spontaneity extends to the setlist. A.J. takes requests, digs into deep cuts and occasionally pulls out older songs from his own catalog. He pays close attention to the pacing and tempos because, above everything else, he wants Croce Plays Croce to be joyful.
“I want everyone there, including myself and my band, to have a great time.”
A.J.’s own musical education helps make that possible.
Growing up, he gravitated toward older jazz, blues, R&B and soul, along with the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Stax and Motown. But he was also very much a child of the 1980s, listening to Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, XTC, Squeeze, the Pretenders, two-tone bands and The Clash.
His musical curiosity eventually put him alongside some of the very legends who had influenced him.
At 18, he toured with B.B. King, including an early show in Seattle. Croce remembers being on King’s bus and discovering just how voraciously the blues legend listened to music. It might be rock one moment and classical guitarist Andrés Segovia the next.
James Brown was similarly curious, Croce recalled, going to a record store every week in search of something new.
“I think that’s the beauty of doing what I do,” A.J. said, “getting to learn from all of the people that came before me and all the people that are coming after me.”
That idea of music moving between generations may ultimately be the heart of Croce Plays Croce.
A.J. sees his father’s influence extending across genres and generations. Jim Croce’s songs have been covered by artists ranging from country performers to emo and British rock acts. A.J. agreed that Jason Mraz was influenced by his father and suggested that the musical family tree may extend to artists such as Ed Sheeran.
At concerts, that generational reach becomes visible.
“I see two, three generations every night,” he said. “I’ll see three generations—a kid and their parents and grandparents. And it’s pretty cool.”
Perhaps that is why A.J. no longer views Croce Plays Croce simply as a tribute.
When he began the project, honoring his father’s legacy may have been its foundation. But something unexpected happened as the show evolved. Audiences weren’t merely remembering Jim. They were discovering the musical relationship between a father and son who never had the opportunity to share a stage—or even truly know one another as adults.
“I learned really quickly that it was really about this beautiful connection that two generations of American songwriters [have], this really kind of cosmic connection, 50 years apart,” A.J. said. “It became something a lot more special than I could have ever dreamed of.”
He sees people crying. He sees them laughing. And, increasingly, he sees the same people returning for a fourth, fifth or sixth performance, sometimes following multiple dates along the West Coast or East Coast.
That response helped him understand what Croce Plays Croce had become.
“It’s not just me,” A.J. said. “It’s not just him.”
Instead, after more than 50 years, two separate musical journeys have somehow found their way onto the same stage.
“It’s this beautiful connection of a father and a son.”
AJ Croce at Seattle’s Moore Theater is Sept 30th at 7:30p. For tix, click HERE.
