The letter arrived one week too late. Inside was Jim Croce’s promise to leave the road behind, to come home to his wife Ingrid and their young son A.J. and finally build the life they had dreamed about. But by the time Ingrid Croce read those words, her husband was already gone.
Jim Croce had finally become a star in 1973 after years of struggle. Bad, Bad Leroy Brown hit number one. But the success came with exhaustion and bad business deals that left him broke. He was tired of touring. He wrote Ingrid a letter from the road, apologizing for the strain and describing his plans to quit, to go to graduate school, to write short stories and movie scripts. He promised they would have a life together. He even joked he had thirty years left.
I still have another thirty years ahead of me
On September 20, 1973, after a concert at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Jim Croce boarded a chartered Beechcraft with guitarist Maury Muehleisen and four others. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff. Everyone aboard was killed. Jim Croce was thirty years old.
The next day his new single I Got a Name was released as planned. Then the mail arrived. About a week after the crash, Ingrid received Jim’s final letter. The promise reached her after the man could not.
His songs kept rising after his death. Time in a Bottle, the song he wrote the night they learned Ingrid was pregnant with A.J., became a posthumous number one by the end of 1973. It made him only the third artist of the rock era to score a posthumous Hot 100 number one.
Years later, A.J. Croce became a musician himself. For a long time he avoided building a career around his father’s songs. Only decades later did he begin performing them publicly as part of Croce Plays Croce. The little boy for whom Time in a Bottle was written grew old enough to stand onstage and sing the songs his father never lived to grow old with.