Early Croce heard again in ‘Facets’

SAN DIEGO - Jim Croce’s first album was supposed to end his musical career before it got started. In 1966, the young folk artist was planning to marry his sweetheart, Ingrid. As the oldest son of a large Italian immigrant family in the Philadelphia area, Mr. Croce was expected to use his college education for a respectable, financially stable line of work.

His parents gave him $500 as a wedding gift, with one stipulation: It must be used to record an album. Mr. Croce’s parents figured the task would be so difficult that he would give up on music.

The plan backfired — 500 copies of the album sold out quickly among fans who had heard Mr. Croce play at local bars, and Mr. Croce then devoted himself to music.

Now, 31 years after Mr. Croce’s death in a plane crash, Ingrid Croce and their son, also a musician, are rereleasing the album, “Facets,” along with a DVD of Mr. Croce’s performances, an early session recorded at the family’s kitchen table, and a collection of photos paired in a hardcover book with the lyrics to “Time in a Bottle” and family reminiscences.

The rerelease, on the Shout Factory label, is made possible by the recent reversion of copyrights to Mr. Croce’s beneficiaries, Ingrid and A.J. Croce.

“Facets” is for the fan of Mr. Croce’s later hits, including “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” who “wants to understand where did it all come from,” Ingrid Croce says at the combination bar, restaurant and performance venue she runs in San Diego.

“It’s a very intimate look at Jim Croce, the college student about to embark on what his parents had hoped was a non-career and something he hoped was a career.”

The album, a combination of Mr. Croce’s early work plus songs by composers he admired, is a remarkably unpolished recording by the 22-year-old musician and his buddies.

During a three-hour session at a Delaware studio, Mr. Croce and his friends laid down 11 tracks, almost all on the first take. The sound is raw: Listeners hear an echo of Mr. Croce’s voice, breathing from the ensemble and even street sounds because the studio windows were left open because of the heat, Mrs. Croce says.

Mr. Croce’s penchant for working-class tales is displayed in his covers of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Steel Rail Blues” and “Coal Tattoo” by Billy Edd Wheeler. His musical arrangement of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din” is a melancholy ode to soldiers. The upbeat “Sun Come Up,” written with his brother Richard, stands out for its pop sensibility.

A bonus disc titled “Jim & Ingrid Too” features a smoother-voiced Mr. Croce partnered with his wife. (The couple met when Ingrid auditioned with her band at the radio station where Mr. Croce worked.)

Nearly all 500 original copies of “Facets” were sold within a week, with Mr. Croce keeping two. The couple were regular performers at a bar in Lima, Pa., and easily sold the LPs for $5 each. Fans ranged “from sheepherders to nuns and priests, and your average Joe, and your alcoholic who hung out at the bar,” Mrs. Croce says.

The original album was issued in a plain copper-colored cover with a bright green label reading only “’Facets’ By Jim Croce.” Ingrid Croce says a few of the originals, now collectors’ items, have been sent to her over the years by fans. The rerelease features a photo of Mr. Croce taken in 1966, wearing a Nehru jacket and a watch he had received as an engagement gift from his family.

At Ingrid Croce’s bar in the downtown Gaslamp area where the couple spent their final weekend together, albums, family photos, awards and even Mr. Croce’s leather jacket hang on the walls.

The memorabilia and the business’ spotlight on live music draw Croce fans from around the world, many who confess to Ingrid the impact his songs have had on their lives.

Her late husband’s music, Mrs. Croce believes, continues to resonate because of its sincerity, its musical appeal and the lyrics’ celebration of Everyman.

“He knew how to take a common experience and express it in under three minutes. … It was a gift. I think he would’ve been thrilled to know people were still interested, and were still listening.”