A.J. Croce No Longer Has Something to Prove

By Brooke Luna

Dressed in black, from his wide-rimmed, rectangular glasses to his jeans and loafers, A.J. Croce took a moment to wipe the sweat from his face with the towel on top of his piano.

He had time. The sold-out crowd at the Bartlett Performing Arts and Conference Center was still applauding his rousing rendition of “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” his late father Jim Croce’s hit from 1972.

A.J. Croce’s Feb. 1 show in Bartlett was one stop on his months-long trek across America for the “Croce Plays Croce” tour.

He had shied away from playing his father’s songs for most of his career. He wanted to forge his own path and not just be known as his father’s son.

What changed?

“After I had success of my own, I didn’t feel like I had anything to prove,” Croce said. “I could take his music and have a lot of fun with it because I knew that the audience would.”

The idea for the tour began years ago when he was transferring some of his father’s old reel-to-reel tapes to digital. Croce was stunned to find that he and his father played covers of the same songs from artists like blues singer Bessie Smith and jazz musician Fats Waller.

Later, when he played a tribute to his father’s music on what would’ve been his dad’s 70th birthday, he felt the excitement running through the audience.

That’s when the only child of a hit singer-songwriter who was gone too soon decided to revive the songs people were longing to hear played again.

Croce wasn’t quite two years old when his father died at age 30 in a plane crash in 1973 in Natchitoches, Louisiana, so he had to get to know his father in other ways.

As a child, Croce lost his sight (he has since regained partial vision), but he would listen to his father’s extensive record collection and place the ones he liked in a pile on his left so he knew which ones they were and could play them again.

“For me, going through my father’s collection and finding Woody Guthrie, some old Coasters thing, Elvis Presley, Muddy Waters, or Mississippi John Hurt, any of those things, that was like a connection to my dad,” Croce told ListenIowa.

Young Croce realized he wanted to be a musician early on in life.

He taught himself how to play the piano at age six by listening to and mimicking other artists who had lost their sight like Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.

After years of practicing five to six hours a day, he became a virtuoso.

He developed a bluesy sound that he said wasn’t directly shaped by one artist or genre in particular but drew inspiration from musicians who were from Memphis or spent time here.

“The music history of Memphis is so rich,” Croce said.

At 17, Croce played his first session in Nashville for Cowboy Jack Clement, who was a staff producer at Sun Studios from 1953 to 1960. A year later, he was touring with B.B. King.

Croce’s most recent record, 2017’s “Just Like Medicine,” was produced by Dan Penn, who moved to Memphis in the 1960s and wrote “Cry Like a Baby” for The Box Tops and produced their hit, “The Letter.”

Croce moved to Nashville in 2008, where he was writing dozens of songs a year. A sought-after musician, Croce said he’ll get knocks on his door once or twice a week from other musicians asking him to play or sing harmony on something they’re working on.

Croce lives in the epicenter of country music, but he describes his own music as “soulful.” To him, that doesn’t mean it has to be one genre. Songs from each of his albums have received radio play across stations like Top 40, Americana, blues, and jazz.

Croce has toured for 30 years and recorded for 28, releasing nine albums in that span. He became an established and respected musician decades ago. He didn’t want “Croce Plays Croce” to be a nostalgia show.

“I didn’t want it to be just my father’s music or else I’d go crazy,” he said.

Jim Croce’s success—10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, the songs “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Time in a Bottle” both hitting number one, his three albums making the top 10 on the Billboard 200, and touring across the country—came in the last 18 months of his life.

Even though his father’s catalog was limited, A.J. had an idea of how to make this tour work.

The setlist for “Croce Plays Croce” would be a marriage of his own music, his father’s music, and the music that connects them.

“I figured out that we had so much music in common,” Croce said. “Even though I don’t have more than those three records of his, I can switch out my music and the music that influenced us on a nightly basis.”

The show at BPACC sold out two months in advance.

BPACC director Michael Bollinger knew he wanted Croce for the venue’s 2019-2020 season after seeing him perform the set at a showcase in New York.

“He’s an excellent singer-songwriter and when I heard he was doing ‘Croce plays Croce,’ I knew I was going to get that in here as part of our season,” Bollinger said. “That’s something that hasn’t been done before here in Memphis.”

Bollinger was particularly moved by the encore, one Croce repeated at the show in Bartlett.

All the lights dimmed, and a single spotlight shone on an acoustic guitar. Jim Croce’s original recording of “Time in a Bottle” began to play, a song most people think of as a romantic love song for a partner or spouse. It was a love song, just about a different kind of love: the love a father has for his son.

As his father’s voice faded out, A.J. stepped into the spotlight and picked up where his dad left off.

*Cover photo by Joshua Black Wilkins