ticketmaster.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cFrom an early age, people were offering a lot of money to do his stuff, but there was no integrity in it and that my heart wasn\u2019t in it.\u201d said Croce. \u201cI began working on the publishing side of music in the late \u201990s. I was cataloging some of his music and I felt I could really contribute to his musical legacy behind the scenes. I felt I could be helpful making young people aware or just people in general aware of his music.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a time in the early 2000s where I was archiving some of his music and I heard this tape of him playing, practicing for what would\u2019ve been like just a coffee house gig. It was all of this music that I had played. I had never heard him play these songs. It was really eerie. I heard him singing these really obscure songs that I had played since I was 13 or 14 years old. Like, \u2018You\u2019re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew\u2019 by Fat Waller, and Pink Anderson songs. I mean one song after another was like hearing something magical. It was like I made a friend. This person had the same taste in music as I did.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like the actual songs. It wasn\u2019t just Fats Waller or Bessie Smith or John Hurt or Skip James, it was the actual songs that we had the same exact choice for one reason or another. That was kind of the catalyst, the first catalyst of like recognizing there was a way to put this show together that was a little deeper, more interesting to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Croce not only plays his father\u2019s music, but he mixes in his own songs for an interesting mix of old and new.<\/p>\n
The road hasn\u2019t been an easy one for A.J. Croce, though.<\/p>\n
He was born in 1971 while the family was living in Upper Darby. Within a couple of years, they had moved to San Diego. Soon after the move his father was killed in the plane crash.<\/p>\n
Suffering the abuse of a caretaker, Croce at the age of 6 was hospitalized for six months and was totally blind in both eyes for six years. That\u2019s when he started playing the piano, inspired by the music of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom the time I could crawl, I was crawling up to the piano at my grandmother\u2019s house in Philadelphia,\u201d Croce said. \u201cWe had an upright when I was a kid and a baby grand when I was a little bit older. I would just go and it was my solace.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the age of 15, the family house burned down and, with it, all of his father\u2019s albums. At 16, Croce started recording on his own.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started touring when I was 16 with Floyd Dixon,\u201d said Croce. \u201cWe played a bunch of drinking songs. Then Willie Nelson took me under his wing and Ray Charles and Jim Kelner and so many other folks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, Croce has come full circle.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis tour is more than a tribute to my father and more than a showcase of my own music, it\u2019s the meeting of my roots and a declaration of my individual artistry,\u201d Croce said. \u201cThis is a journey through soul and sound.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Singer-songwriter and Upper Darby native Jim Croce died in a plane crash in 1973 at, what was arguably,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1213,289,199,147,149,148,150],"class_list":{"0":"post-28787","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upper-darby","8":"tag-music-and-concerts","9":"tag-things-to-do","10":"tag-top-stories-mlt","11":"tag-upper-darby","12":"tag-upper-darby-headlines","13":"tag-upper-darby-news","14":"tag-upper-darby-township"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}