It's always easy to look back at musicians who died young and wonder what could have been. Jim Croce may not have been an artist with the stature of a Hendrix or Joplin, but I think he was at least better than James Taylor. So there. Photographs and Memories, his posthumous greatest hits collection, gathers all the key tracks from his short discography, almost half of them coming from his most famous record, You Don't Mess Around with Jim (which I also own). Probably having both of these records is somewhat redundant, but I will refrain from discarding one and keeping the other, at least for the time being. Croce basically has two personas: funny man ("Bad Bad Leroy Brown" and "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" as the prime examples) and sensitive balladeer ("Time in a Bottle"). He was a good enough songwriter to do well at both, and I commend him for that. These are not great songs, but they are by and large good songs, and I can always make room in my collection for solid, well-performed music. Keeper.
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