A.J. Croce Talks Connecting with Singer Dad Jim's Legacy 50 Years After Fatal Plane Crash (Exclusive)

The 52-year-old reconnects with the father he barely knew by reviving songs like “Operator” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” on the Croce Plays Croce tour

Jim Croce was on his way to his next concert when he boarded a chartered plane in Natchitoches, Louisiana on September 20, 1973. But in his own mind, he had already arrived. After spending the better part of a decade driving trucks and working construction jobs to supplement meager earnings playing restaurants and coffee shops in Pennsylvania, the singer-songwriter scored three Top 10 songs in just 18 months — including the No. 1 hit “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown .” But the 30-year-old blue-collar troubadour’s promising career came to a shocking end when his Beechcraft E18S crashed into a tree on takeoff, killing everyone on board.

Four days later, Jim’s widow received a letter he had sent shortly before the fatal flight. It ended with a message to their son AJ, who turned 2 that week: “Kiss my little man and tell him daddy loves him. Remember, the first 60 years count, and I have 30 more to go.”

Portrait of Jim Croce in 1972.

Paul Wilson

Half a century after this devastating loss, AJ — now 52 and a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist — embarks on a cross-country tour with Croce Plays Croce: 50th Anniversary, a night of music and remembrance that blends his own songs with those of the father he barely knew.

“I’m celebrating my father’s legacy, but it’s really the legacy of two generations of musicians,” he says in the new issue of PEOPLE. “We share a love for storytelling and music. I’m not a cover band per se, although sometimes I sound like my father — even though I’m about 20 years older than him at this point.”

The revolting set list is based on the elder Croce’s three LPs from the ’70s — You don’t mess with Jim, Life and timesand I have a name — which were reissued last year in a 50th anniversary set. “I play a different show every night,” he says. “I always open it up to the audience to shout what they want to hear. I didn’t want the play to be just nostalgia. I wanted him to be alive, breathing and vital.”

Until recently, AJ was reluctant to perform his father’s songs in public. “I’ve had the opportunity to do this all my life,” he says. “I resisted it for 25 years because I just didn’t feel there was any integrity in capitalizing on his music without making my own mark.” But after four decades of his own career, he’s made it clear that he’s more than just his famous last name. After cutting his teeth as a touring keyboardist in his early teens (handpicked by BB King, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and James Brown), he released a string of critically acclaimed albums, sharing songwriting with R&B stars like Allen Toussaint and Leon Russell.

A turning point in AJ’s relationship with his father’s music came in 2012, when he performed a handful of Jim’s classics at a party celebrating his 70th birthday. The audience response was a transformative surprise. “I thought I’d have an audience of people sitting back like a classical critic, studying every note and seeing if I was playing it just like my father,” says AJ. “But I found it to be the opposite. I had the joy of being able to connect with something that meant so much to people, and at the same time make it completely alive and new.”

Music has always been a part of AJ’s life. His earliest memories include crawling around the legs of the family piano. “I can’t remember a day without music,” he says. This helped him cope with the death of his father and another early tragedy. When AJ was 4 years old, he went blind – as a result, he claims, of physical abuse by his mother’s boyfriend at the time. (He regained his sight in one eye as a 10-year-old.) He soon blossomed into a piano prodigy, writing songs while most of his peers struggled to write words and spending more than eight hours a day at the keys.

“I was inspired by Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder — they were big for me. These albums were part of my father’s record collection. When I lost my sight, a family friend pulled them out and said, ‘These might be inspirational.’ So through my challenges and with the help of others, I really managed to discover music. Then I was able to discover a lot more that was part of my father’s record collection — old blues, jazz, rock & roll and soul music.”

Most of this record collection was lost, along with most other memorabilia, in a fire at the family home when AJ was a teenager. But they were able to save one of Jim’s guitars, a 1933 Gibson L-00 on which he wrote many of his greatest songs — including his posthumous No. 1, “Time in a Bottle”, written the day he found out he was going to be a father. The instrument remains a treasured possession for AJ. “He inspired me to learn to play the guitar,” he says. “I’m left-handed, but I learned to play the guitar with my right hand because of that guitar. For me it is one of the most beautiful instruments.”

Croce Plays Croce tour poster, Jim Croce and son AJ Croce.

The musical bond between father and son was strengthened recently when AJ came across a homemade tape of Jim performing obscure blues and folk tunes. “There were deep cuts by Bessie Smith, Pink Anderson, Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James. Old blues, old country. Every song he played was a song I’d played since I was a teenager, but I’d never heard him play them!”

The effect was almost supernatural, like a message from the other side. “That made the hair on my neck stand up. These were not things that were in his collection. I found most of them myself. It was a huge moment for me. I realized that we have a connection that goes deeper than DNA itself. You recognize something in your parents that you carry, even though it is not scientifically explained.”

He included some of those covers in the setlist for Croce Plays Croce, sprinkling them among his own songs and those of his father. For AJ, performing Jim’s favorite hits means more than just playing in front of an audience — it helps him recover. Each song is a fragment that allows him to compose a complete portrait of his father as a man and as an artist. “When you look at his catalog of songs, you’re looking at moments from his life,” he says. “They gave me a better sense of who he was.”

The family affair is rounded off by AJ’s mother Ingrid, who occasionally joins him on stage. Although her speech aphasia has left her unable to converse, her singing remains unchanged and she often appears in encores. “It’s one of the neat ways we can communicate now,” he says. “She co-wrote ‘Hey Tomorrow’, which was on my father’s first album, Your Don’t mess with Jim. So we invited her to join us on that and sing the original harmony on that, which was really cool. I’m saving that song for when it’s there. But whatever she wants to do, I’m happy to have her.”

Jim Croce with his wife Ingrid and son AJ, Christmas 1971.

Courtesy of AJ Croce

The evening’s emotional centerpiece, 1972’s “Photographs and Memories” (“All I’ve got is this to remember you by…”), was further poignant with childhood footage and home movies projected above the stage. But instead of ending in tears, AJ’s ever-changing playlist always has the same closer: “I Got a Name.” Released the day after Jim’s death, it seemed adjusted for a moment. “I have a name and I carry it with me like my dad,” sings AJ. It’s a voice 20 years older than the man who made it a hit. And it is a voice full of pride.

“People get so emotional listening to music and stories,” he says. “I avoided performing my father’s songs [because] I thought he was actually the only person who could pull them off. And in a way I still feel it. But I can tell you that people come to see the tour as Jim Croce fans and leave as my fans. I could never have imagined – and never would have had the ego to expect – that by performing these concerts I would have more fans of my music. It’s really very special. I feel incredibly lucky.”

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Source: HIS Education