I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story

by Ingrid Croce

  The Paddock was a haven for the wealthy to get down and dirty, for students to find refuge from teachers and parents, and for working guys like Bill to be their unabashed selves.

  Carrying his guitar case, Jim entered the Paddock for the first time. He saw Bill playing the banjo onstage and took a table close by. Before Bill completed the set, he invited Jim to join him.

  Jim took out his guitar and took the stage, and the two finished the set taking turns singing lead and harmonizing. Bill played bluegrass, and Jim threw in some popular country tunes.

  One of the owners, Dolores Meehan, liked what she heard. When Jim stepped away for a break, she hired him as a solo performer on the spot.

  “You’ll get a free prime rib dinner,” she said. “Plus $25 a night and all the drinks you want.” Dolores was a small woman with short blond curls and a starched shirt-waist dress emphasizing her big bust. She was sophisticated, businesslike, and a bit uptight, especially compared with her husband, Paul, an Irishman who remained relaxed and easygoing under any circumstance. He did the cooking, and she booked the acts and took care of operations. They seemed an unlikely couple but did a great job making the Riddle Paddock a busy and successful club.

  “Well, thanks,” Jim replied shyly, surprised but very pleased to land the job. “I guess we have Bill to thank for this.”

  “Just don’t drink as much as he does,” she grumbled.

  Little did Dolores know that Jim could hold his own when it came to liquor. But to his credit, no matter how much he drank, from bottles of beer to martinis in beer glasses, his control over his actions and his ability to sing remained intact.

  From that night on, Jim became a regular performer at the Paddock, singing several nights a week. Landing his first regular gig was just the boost he needed. It was a world apart from entertaining at colleges and his parents’ church functions. He was eager for me to see him perform professionally and to join him onstage.

  One Saturday night, we entered the Paddock through a back door off the small kitchen. The delicious smell of rare prime rib and hot baked, buttered potatoes caught Jim at once, as it usually did.

  His gaze rested on a rare slab of beef lying on an old wooden plank, kept warm by a red heat lamp.

  “No! No!” Dolores screamed. “Don’t you dare serve it like that!”

  “Why not?” exclaimed her husband. “It looks downright appetizing!” Dolores pursued Paul through the doors from the dining room.

  “What’s all the commotion?” Jim asked. Dolores kept close behind Paul, who was carrying a huge, freshly prepared family-style salad.

  “A mouse got caught in the exhaust fan,” she said, gasping for breath, “and it landed in pieces all over the salad. Paul wants to take it out to get a rise from the guests.”

  With a comically ghoulish look, Paul swung the salad bowl into Jim’s view. It was strewn with odd bits of mouse.

  “Yum, I’ll take a drumstick,” Jim laughed. He picked out a tiny, bloody leg from the lettuce leaves and Roquefort dressing.

  “Oh my God!” I blurted out.

  Dolores slapped Jim’s hand. “Shit, you men disgust me. Jim, go out there and entertain the crowd, and Paul, make another salad!”

  But before she could stop him, Paul took the mouse salad out for the guests to admire.

  Exasperated, she grumbled about Paul’s exploits for a moment, then turned to walk away when she noticed my wide-eyed expression.

  “Who is this, Jim?” she asked, changing from demanding wife to a gracious host. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

  “Of course,” he replied.

  Paul came bounding back into the kitchen, puffed up with pride from the rave reviews his salad received.

  “Dolores and Paul,” Jim said politely, “I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Ingrid.” Jim squeezed my hand. “She’s going to sing with me tonight.”

  “Glad to meet you,” Paul said, slamming the salad bowl down on the edge of a steel sink.

  “It’s not always like this here,” Dolores apologized. “I’m going to clean up this mess, but I can’t wait to hear you sing later, Ingrid. You must know the crowd goes crazy for Jim.”

  Jim settled me in at the front table near the stage, and I watched him take command of the room. He looked happy and confident. Then, when his first set was almost over, he asked me to join him onstage. The audience quieted as we began to sing together, taking in the close harmony of our voices and no doubt sensing the desire we had for each other.

  After we finished the set, I went back to my table, and Jim asked a Royal Air Force officer in the crowd, whose music he’d grown to enjoy, to join him in “The Doggy Song,” an old bawdy ballad. The Irish and Australian sheepherders always argued about whether or not Jim had the lyrics right, and he knew the song would stir things up. Each faction taught Jim their own version, and he sang each side’s lyrics separately. He nodded to the officer, and they began:

  The doggies had a meeting, they’d come from near and far,

  Some by motorcycle and some by motorcar.

  Each doggy passed the entrance, each doggy signed the book

  Then each unzipped his asshole, and hung it on a hook.

  Jim loved embarrassing his crowd with profanity and boyish humor. He sang a couple more versus and ended with the punch line:

  So that’s the reason why, sir, when walking down the street

  And that’s the reason why, sir, when doggies chance to meet,

  And that’s the reason why on land and sea and foam,

  Dogs will sniff each other’s asshole to see if it’s his own.

  The crowd roared and clapped. “Another one!” they shouted. “More bawdy ballads!” the Australian sheepherders demanded. Jim continued with one entitled “Cats on the Rooftop.”

  Bill Reid came into the Paddock and sat at a table near me, chugging down a couple beers with a woman he had just met. Her name was Chris Sigafoos, a beautiful, shapely blonde. Bill had eyed her from across the room and immediately strode over to her table and challenged her to a beer chugging contest. This was Bill’s usual method for impressing the opposite sex.

  Chris laughed and accepted without hesitation. She had recently emigrated from Germany after marrying a medical student who was attending the University of Pennsylvania. To her, the pale American beer was like drinking water, and she liked Bill’s brashness and bold, broad smile. Eager to win the bet, she drank her drafts down with ease, one right after the other.

  One of the Irish sheepherders yelled to get the officer off the stage and bring me back up to sing. “I don’t want some bloody Englishman slobberin’ all over the microphone!” he shouted.

  The Englishman insulted him back, and between the amplified argument and the din of voices and clinking glasses, the audience scarcely noticed that a fistfight had simultaneously broken out between a country redneck and a black man who was sitting with a white woman.

  Jim kept playing until a rather intoxicated waitress started pulling on his guitar, trying to get him to dance with her. Trying to get away from her grasp, Jim accidentally poked one of the guitar’s tuning pegs through her hoop earring, then pulled her around in a circle and shouted, “Why doesn’t everybody just sit down and be nice?”

  Nobody was paying much attention to Jim now.

  A beer bottle bounced off a chair, and I scrambled toward the kitchen for shelter. Like a scene in an old Western movie, more fights broke out, and more bottles and chairs began crashing around the room.

  Bill had lost the beer chugging contest to Chris and was stomping around in a drunken sulk, enraged that he’d lost to a woman. Chris was laughing and teasing him unmercifully.

  “I’ll pull my dick out and chase you around the room with it,” he shouted.

  “Go ahead!” she shouted back. “Flip it out right here on the table! I’ll bet you $10 you can’t find it!” He glared and then grinned, his anger giving way to admiration.

  To save face, he went and wrestled the re
dneck who had started the near-riot to the floor and threw him out of the bar. Gradually people began to sit back down, and the Paddock’s vague sense of order seemed momentarily restored.

  “My foot!” Paul suddenly shouted.

  It was pinned to the floor by a butcher knife.

  Blood pulsed out, and Paul stood transfixed, staring down at the huge knife stuck in his foot.

  Jim ran and found me, and we joined the crowd hovering around Paul. The brawny Irishman stood proudly until everyone had a good look. Dolores insisted that he pull it out so she could take him to the hospital. He yanked the knife out of his foot, and Dolores cleaned and wrapped his foot with kitchen towels. They quickly left for the hospital.

  Jim headed back to the stage to finish his set for the crowd, who acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. As he passed one of the regular patrons, whom he knew as the owner of a nearby dog kennel, the old man grabbed his sleeve and tugged on it. Jim nodded to him, picked up his guitar, and began playing “Old Blue,” a sentimental ballad about a hunting dog:

  When Old Blue died he died so hard

  He shook the ground in my backyard.

  We lowered him down with a golden chain

  And with every link we called Blue’s name . . .

  Just as he did every week, the old man listened to Jim sing “his song” and drank his beer with tears streaming down his face.

  When Jim finished “Old Blue” the old man stuffed Jim’s shirt pocket with a couple dollars. “Thanks,” Jim said quietly. And indeed, he was grateful for the old man’s regular tips.

  The Riddle Paddock was Jim’s longest-running gig ever. From the beginning of his junior year, his performances at the Paddock gave him a great audience for trying out new songs and monologues.

  By spring, I had become a regular feature in Jim’s show. At first, I only sang a song or two with him. But in time, I had begun to take requests for solos, with Jim standing off to my right, accompanying me on guitar. I felt comfortable onstage.

  With all the practicing we’d done, performing was easy, especially without having to play an instrument. I was able to follow Jim’s lead, and our repertoire grew quickly. I loved singing with Jim, but it was different for me. I wanted to sing with him forever, but I wasn’t ambitious about becoming a professional musician.

  I loved singing with Jim as I had with my late mother, since some of my best memories of her are of when she accompanied me on the piano. I often thought that I would be a performer, as she was, and that I might even have the talent for it. But deep down I believed my true calling lay elsewhere, and what I wanted now, more than anything, was to help Jim become a star.

  While I loved making music with Jim, there was one part of our performances that made me really uncomfortable. Singing bawdy ballads was one of Jim’s favorite aspects of performing at the Riddle Paddock. But I was embarrassed to sing those tunes, and Jim knew he could get a rise out of me. As I’d seen him do with his mother the night I’d met her, he’d put me on the spot. He’d interrupt our set with a bawdy ballad or two. Jim’s way of impishly cloaking the vulgarity of the words by immortalizing their classical place in history was fun for him, but I had been brought up around foul language when I lived with my mother and grandmother, and the cursing and swearing I heard in arguments at home, and down on Philly’s rough South Street, made me want to be more proper. Singing vulgar lyrics in public was not something I wanted to do at all. It just felt wrong.

  Though I would complain to Jim under my breath that I didn’t want to sing those songs, he’d ignore my protests and say I was way too serious. Then he’d pause mid-song, waiting along with the audience for me to sing a verse.

  Although it seemed merely a part of our act, Jim truly embarrassed me and used my embarrassment to make the act funnier. The longer I hesitated to sing the verse, the more cheers we got from the crowd, especially on the wild nights, when the audience called out for their favorites.

  On one such wild night that spring, I was fortunate to be in the audience and not onstage as Jim did his thing.

  “You know,” he began, “some of the greatest songs in our language came from the English tradition. You go down into the Appalachians, start digging around, and you’ll find that a lot of tunes that became our folk songs originally came from England, Scotland, and Wales. And then, if you really get a chance to sit around in some of these countries, you’ll discover pub songs, originally sung by the British army and navy.”

  Jim started to play the introduction to a popular hymn on his guitar and continued: “Ya know, in those days they used to just kind of pick up a melody. Most of the time the only songs they knew in common were ones they’d learned in church. So they’d write new words and convert a hymn into a common song. This is one that must have brought the wrath upon them. It’s an old piping tune, and I’ll just do a bit to show you how it happened. Then we’ll lead you to that great world of traditional bawdy English ballads.” With a twinkle in his eyes, Jim launched into:

  Oh, her name is Diamond Lily,

  She’s a whore in Piccadilly,

  And her brother’s got a brothel on the Strand.

  And her father sells his asshole round

  The elephant and castle,

  They’re the richest bloody family in the land.

  “Well, that’s how it all started,” he explained. “And then there were some great English poets who decided they’d couple their brash wit with their church tunes and create tunes of their own. Rudyard Kipling wrote a few and promptly lost his position as Poet Laureate of England when he wrote the song, ‘God Bless the Bastard King of England.’

  “And Robert Burns, the Scottish poet and rake,” Jim went on in rich brogue, “used to attend parties in the Highlands and related how a particular lyric was inspired by one of the most famous tunes in the English language. At a great party many years ago, it was told, some fellow sprinkled itching powder on the floor. Now in this part of the country the locals wore ‘ken underwear,’ which in Scottish stands for ‘no underwear,’ so when they began to dance, they kicked this itching powder onto their legs and up their skirts. And at the same time, somebody put an aphrodisiac in the punch. Soon, everybody’s giving each other that lean and hungry look, that lewd and lascivious stare that meant, ‘You’re going to be the recipient of my long anticipated glee.’

  “Then somebody put the oil lamp out, and, as is recorded in the Library of Congress, what happened next, lad, was an orgy of such great magnitude that forty acres of corn were fucked completely flat.”

  Over his audience’s shrieks of laughter, Jim leaned into the mic and sang:

  Four and twenty virgins,

  Came down from Inverness,

  And when the Ball was over

  There were four and twenty less.

  While he continued playing, and still in brogue, he told them, “Remember this chorus because I want you to sing it with me after each verse.” He sang it once through and had them repeat it with him:

  Singing, balls to your partner

  Your ass against the wall,

  If you never been had on a Saturday night,

  You’ve never been had at all.

  The crowd expressed their enthusiasm with cheers and whistles. “If that’s tickled your fancy, listen to the next eleven verses,” Jim continued:

  There was doing in the parlor,

  And doing on the stones,

  But you could not hear the music,

  For the wheezing and the groans . . .

  The audience joined in stronger, shouting the first line of the chorus, “Singing, balls to your partner,” after every verse, but then instantly hushed as Jim began the next, and then the next, each more outrageous than the last, until the song came to its crescendo with the final verse, followed by the final chorus, with everyone screaming the words at the top of their lungs:

  The village magician he was there,

  He gave us all a laugh.

  He pulled his
foreskin over his head,

  And he vanished up his ass.

  Singing, balls to your partner

  Your ass against the wall,

  If you’ve never been had on a Saturday night,

  You’ve never been had at all!

  As Jim stood there onstage, beaming at having succeeded in leading the entire audience into an X-rated frenzy of song and laughter, I couldn’t help thinking that in spite of his family trying to stifle his true ambition, he was doing exactly what he was meant to do: expressing himself through his music.

  ALABAMA RAIN

  ONE NIGHT IN THE SPRING of 1964, Jim had called to say he was on his way over, and I sat in my bedroom listening, as I always did, for the hum of his VW bug. He lived in Drexel Hill, just a short distance away, but that night the fifteen minutes it ordinarily took for him to get to our house in Springfield felt unusually long.

  When he arrived, I ran downstairs. He and my dad were already in conversation when I reached the living room. Before I could greet him, my stepmother came over and gave Jim a big hug and said, “Jim, I prepared a delicious, traditional Shabbat dinner with brisket and kasha and varnishkas. Let me get you a plate.”

  “I’d love to try some, but I just finished dinner with my family. How about next time?”

  My twin sister interrupted their conversation with another hug and told Jim that her friend had a crush on his brother, Rich.