AJ Croce says in his imagination, he’s on stage with his father, Jim Croce, playing folk music together. “There’s moments where I feel like he’s right there,” he says.
Jim, passed away on Sept. 20, 1973, eight days before AJ’s second birthday, in a single plane crash.
He was 30 years old.
“I remember feeling a certain way in his presence,” AJ says. “I remember from my very earliest memories, there was always music in the house.”
“It’s hard to tell which memories blend with home videos and recordings.”
A singer-songwriter, Jim Croce defined late ’60s early ’70s folk with hits like “I Got a Name,” “Time in a Bottle” and “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song.”
Now at 53, AJ says the Croce Plays Croce tour is him playing a role in preserving his father’s legacy. “What I discovered really early on in the process of performing the Croce Plays Croce shows, was that it was the legacy of a family, not just of one person,” he says.
That’s how AJ still feels connected to his father, he says, by being a musician. “I think it’s just the memory of the people we love and the idea of the things we love gives them a life of their own,” he says. “As long as we remember the things that are important to us and people and animals that we care about — they live.”
By performing his dad’s songs for the world to hear and remember, the name Croce lives on, he says.
Initially, AJ wanted to challenge himself to find an identity from out under his father’s shadow. However, “I think as soon as no one was expecting me to perform something of my father’s, that became the time when it was most fun to perform his music,” he says.
Now, AJ invites any Croce fan — from the casual to the diehard — to come and enjoy an evening of song and storytelling.
“The secret of this, of this tour and this concert is the stories that I tell and that are part of who my father was. Now he would perform a show — could be a two hour show — he might only play five or six songs, because he was telling stories and and talking about where the music came from,” AJ says.
“I felt like it was really an important facet of it,” he says.
AJ has his own emotional connection to his dad’s music, too. “‘Time in a Bottle’ is probably the most powerful [song]. It was written for me,” he says.
“I’ve thought countless times of the fact that we may have played this song together,” he says. “It’s in my imagination, but it’s something that’s pretty powerful.”
AJ says the journey he’s taken to the stage hasn’t been easy, and that he never expected to be where he is now. Listening to his father’s immense record collection — complete with Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Mississippi John Hurt, Bessie Smith and so many more — is what inspired AJ to become a musician in his youth.
Then — for as long as he could remember — AJ spent time around his grandmother’s upright piano. “There’s photos of me before I was one years old, you know, sitting at the piano with a sandwich in one hand and my other hand on the keys,” he says.
“It just — it drew me in.”
When he was old enough, AJ’s mother, Ingrid, gifted him his father’s old 1930s Gibson acoustic guitar — the guitar Jim wrote his first records on.
“I didn’t inherit some fortunes. I inherited a record collection and a cool, old guitar,” AJ says. “It was the best way to make a living that I could think of.”
“There really are no guarantees. It’s a roller coaster of a career. It’s a calling and most of it is not glamorous, but it is really rewarding to be able to entertain an audience and help people just forget the world around them for 90 minutes,” AJ says.
Forget your troubles as AJ Croce plays Croce at McDonald Theatre 8 pm, Saturday Oct. 19. Tickets can be purchased online McDonaldTheatre.com ranging from $55 to $95.