Jim Croce, "I Got a Name"

There's a temptation to look for date hooks when posting almost-daily blog entries. But I don't want this blog to be "On This Day in Music History." Still, many anniversaries deserve to be noted, and I missed one a little over a week ago: September 20 marked the 35th anniversary of the death of the wonderful Jim Croce.

Croce was as unlikely as pop stars get: with a nose and a mustache his face could barely contain, and a stage outfit of worn dungarees, he looked more like someone who'd spent the day painting houses than someone who was sharing the charts with Bowie and McCartney and Stevie Wonder and Cher. And that's one of the glories of the early '70s in pop and rock: you really could rise on the quality of the songs. And Croce, in his short chart career, had a magnificent quality to his.

"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" is one of the very first songs I ever remember hearing. (Helps that its chorus mentioned a junkyard, at a time when I owned a board game called Junkyard and was watching a lot of Fat Albert and Sanford & Son - junkyards were a frequent theme in the mid '70s in my world.) It's a wonder of storytelling, as are its related "You Don't Mess Around With Jim," and on the other side of the coin, the gentle "Operator" and the seemingly Spanish wind of "Time in a Bottle."

But my favorite was, and is, "I Got a Name," a declaration of independence and identity that has guided me through many a moment of self-doubt. Jim knew the value of keeping one's dreams at the front of one's heart, even if it means walking a path alone while trying to actualize those dreams. He went there proud, and succeeded fabulously, even if he tragically did not get to reap the rewards of his work, his songcraft. Life did not pass him by, and I hope we can all say the same for ourselves.