Legacy
The album I Got a Name was released on December 1, 1973. Croce had just finished recording the album just over a week before his death. The posthumous release included three hits: "Workin' at the Car Wash Blues", "I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song", and the title song, which had been used as the theme to the film The Last American Hero which was released two months prior to his death. The album reached No. 2 and "I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song" reached No. 9 on the singles chart.
The song "Time in a Bottle" had been featured over the opening and closing credits and during a scene in which Desi Arnaz Jr. is opening the 'Don't Mess Around With Jim' album in the ABC made-for-television movie She Lives!, which aired on September 12, 1973. That appearance had generated significant interest in Croce and his music in the week just prior to the plane crash. That, combined with the news of the death of the singer, sparked a renewed interest in Croce's previous albums. Consequently, three months later, "Time in a Bottle", originally released on Croce's first album the year before, hit number-one on December 29, 1973, the third posthumous chart-topping song of the rock era following Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" and Janis Joplin's recording of "Me and Bobby McGee".
A greatest hits package entitled Photographs & Memories, released in 1974, proved to be extraordinarily popular. Later posthumous releases have included Home Recordings: Americana, Facets, Jim Croce: Classic Hits, Down the Highway, and DVD and CD releases of Croce's television performances, Have You Heard: Jim Croce Live. In 1990, Croce was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
The Croces' son Adrian James (born September 28, 1971) is now an accomplished singer-songwriter, musician, and pianist, and owners/operates his own record label, Seedling Records.
Mrs. Croce owns and manages Croce's Restaurant & Jazz Bar---a project she and Jim had jokingly discussed a decade earlier—in the historic Gaslamp Quarter in downtown San Diego. She opened the business in 1985. On July 3, 2012, Mrs. Croce published a memoir about her late husband, entitled I Got a Name: the Jim Croce Story.
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Famous quotes containing the word legacy:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)