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BETWEEN 1966 and 1973, Jim Croce released several iconic songs.
Much of his success came after his sudden passing, which sparked one of the biggest posthumous sales booms in the history of music.
Who was Jim Croce and what was his cause of death?
Jim Croce was a singer and songwriter from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He first garnered attention in the mid-1960s but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that his career really took off.
At the start of the new decade, he released four top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels), One Less Set of Footsteps, and Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, which spent two weeks at No. 1 in July 1973, according to Billboard.
By all accounts, Croce’s career had finally taken off, but tragically, his life was cut short.
On September 20, 1973 – the same day as the famous Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs – Croce died in a plane crash.
The 30-year-old budding star had performed just hours before at Northwestern State University in Louisiana.
He was survived by his wife, Ingrid Croce, and their son, Adrian James “A.J.” Croce, who went on to become a singer-songwriter in the 1990s.
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What caused Jim Croce’s plane to crash?
Croce and five other individuals boarded a chartered Beechcraft E18S en route to Sherman, Texas, for a scheduled show at Austin College, however, it never reached its destination.
Roughly 250 yards past the runway, the plane clipped the top of a pecan tree, and moments later, it crashed.
Many believe that the hazy weather conditions obstructed the pilot’s view, according to the Louisiana Radio Network.
“The front half of it you couldn’t tell it was a plane,” Dan McDonald, a former student reporter for Northwestern’s student newspaper, recalled.
“The back half was still in tack but the front half was just demolished. All you saw was fiberglass, twisted metal. Every time I hear a song of his now on the radio that just flashes in front of my mind.”
The cause of the crash was described as pilot error, according to Ultimate Classic Rock & Culture.
Who was on the plane with Jim Croce?
There were a total of six people on Croce’s plane and they all passed away.
The people who lost their lives alongside the musician include:
- Ken Cortese, Croce’s booking agent
- Maury Muehleisen, a guitarist
- George Stevens, a comedian
- Dennis Rast, Croc’s manager
- Robert N. Elliot, the pilot of the plane
