There are few voices in the world of music that have affected me like Jim Croce’s. Something resonates. Perhaps it is the tone, the register, the sweetness that just stops me in my tracks and insists I sing along to every word. It could be my identification with the lyric, the imagined 6 degrees I had with him back in the early 1970s, or maybe even because he is actually one of the few voices I can sing to and not sound horrific.
The 50th anniversary of singer Jim Croce’s sad and tragic death was just a couple of weeks ago on September 20th. If that isn’t enough to make me melancholy about time and mortality, I just can’t be quite sure what is. I didn’t really know Croce’s music until many others did in 1972 when his “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” and “Life and Times” LPs were released and for a short, beautiful, and memorable musical period the man was becoming a living icon in folk and rock music circles. The silky baritone, with a deep, rich delivery was reassuring and comfortable. He was an artist I could picture singing and playing in a living room as well as a crowded stadium to an equally enthusiastic audience.
I did not know Mr. Croce but felt as though I did. I remember our neighbors across the street going out to see Jim Croce and expect that I might have spun that into an actual encounter rather than a much more likely concert. I did not really have much of a taste for folksier music when I was in my teen years, but the voice so captured a moment in my life then, as it does when I hear it still today, that I cannot help but to add the singer to my higher rank of overall artistry and effect on my own character and being.
In my teens, his music represented a contented place in a huge amount of growing angst inside. It’s hard enough being a teenager but I carried so many secrets around that I know now it was weighing me down. Even within the beauty of his music, there can be an overload of gloominess that sweeps over me when I think of certain songs individually or sometimes the complete library of work.
Today, having been triggered originally by “Operator (That’s not the way it Feels)” before choosing the wider and more self-assured “I Got a Name,” I felt a burst of melancholy in my current world the result of having made a decision this week about how life will change at the end of the current calendar year. In the lyric of “I Got a Name,” the artist sings about moving me down the highway, moving ahead so life won’t pass me by. Whereas I spend so much time denoting the source of the trigger as coming from when the music was originally heard, I sometimes forget that whatever I might be feeling currently is more obvious or telling if the music somehow mirrors where I am in my present moment. I am indeed moving on, which comes with the sadness of an upcoming ending, and the relief and ultimate happiness in having made a decision that better suits me as an evolving human being than where I currently feel myself these days.
But there are songs like “Operator” that just make me want to cry. Who hasn’t felt the gorgeous sadness in ‘isn’t that the way they say it goes? But let’s forget all that and give me the number if you can find it so I can call just to tell her I’m fine and to show I’ve overcome the blow. I only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn’t real. But that’s not the way it feels.’ And then there is classic “Time in a Bottle,” where the artist sings ‘but there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them…’ Who cannot identify with the passage of our lives and the people we don’t get to see or know better because we are busy with incorrect priorities and the demand on the person we have convinced ourselves we are?
And sure, there are times when we actually ARE that person authentically, but there are other times when our heads and hearts will not listen to the very problems we are creating out of thin air to supposedly protect ourselves. Most of the time it is inevitable that I am doing my best. I have been beautifully taught how to avoid the dramas and pitfalls that regularly live all around me. I can recognize them as they come up. I can size them up as I would anything else. I have long learned that my awareness is the primary tool and the memory of something in the past or the trigger to something in the present are both felt right then and there. These thoughts come and go, but when they do show themselves I have always felt deep respect and hope for the processes that have re-emerged and the good fortune to feel anything from the music at all half a century later.
It can be hard to imagine what sort of treasures might have also been written had that plane not crashed. After all, he wasn’t only melancholy. There were barroom anthems like “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” and “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” to raise a glass to (make mine non-alcoholic). In the end, any melancholy the music brings me is always followed by a new resurgence of the happiness and joy I get from remembering the music is an introduction to whatever comes next in life. My existence on the planet is set for a new adventure coming very soon.
Like the pine trees winding me down the road, I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name
Like the singin’ bird and the croakin’ toad, I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name
And I carry it with me like my daddy did, but I’m living the dream that he kept hid
Movin’ me down the highway
Rollin’ me down the highway
Movin’ ahead so life won’t pass me by.