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Jim Croce’s music, the art of a master storyteller, lives decades after the fact and after the passing of this musician himself because of its profound and accessible human-ness.
Croce might be carrying on about Leroy Brown and his ‘diamond ring under everybody’s nose’ who ended up looking like ‘a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone’. Or revealing his own heart in ‘Operator’, whereupon having given up on reaching an old lover who’s taken up with ‘my best old ex-friend Ray’, he offers the operator all that he has: a compllment (‘you’ve been so much more than kind’) and a dime. Or working his way through the album’s reflective, tempo-and-emotion-shifting title song ‘Photographs and Memories’. In all of these, Croce shows himself to have been a man who was remarkably in touch with both the private and social movements of human hearts. His powers of observation are both ironic and sympathetic, ranging down to the detail of Rapid Roy’s ‘tattoo on his arm that says “Baby!” and another one that just says “Hey!”.
To judge by the man’s lyrics, his short life was a lonely one, full of wistful longings for lovers who he still can’t believe are gone, a hometown far from New York, and friends without talons.
Yet in the midst of his transparent fragility, Croce maintains a man’s dignity. The moving ‘I’ve Got a Name’ is a testament with roots that goes deep in several directions. ‘If it gets me nowhere, I’ll go there proud’.
Though he makes it virtually impossible to choose a crowning moment in this album—one follows another like mountain ridges before a hiker—the most emblematic of his short career and life may be the unforgettable song that is built around these find words:
Every time I tried to tell you,
The words just came out wrong.
So I’ll have to say ‘I love you’
In a song.
Which is just what Croce has done.
Canter Bridge 
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