Jim Croce met his future wife, Ingrid Jacobson, on November 29, 1963, at a hootenanny at the Philadelphia Convention Hall, where he was judging a contest. They made music together and released a joint album in 1968, which failed commercially. To pay the bills, Jim worked a string of jobs, including schoolteacher, truck driver and radio DJ. At one point he was working three jobs at once and had almost no time left for music.
In December 1970, Ingrid told him she was pregnant with their first child, Adrian James (A.J.). According to Songfacts and Stereogum, Jim wrote “Time in a Bottle” that very night. Ingrid later said the song is about more than becoming parents: it is about how precious life is and about taking chances.
The song sat on side two of the 1972 album You Don’t Mess Around with Jim and was never a single. On September 20, 1973, the plane carrying Jim crashed on takeoff. He was 30, and it was eight days before A.J.’s second birthday. Around the same time, the song was used in the ABC TV movie She Lives, and listeners called radio stations asking to hear it again. ABC Records released it as a single in November 1973, and on December 29, 1973 it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It became the third posthumous #1 in the chart’s history, after Otis Redding and Janis Joplin. The single “I Got a Name” came out the day after his death and reached the top 10.
A.J. Croce grew up to be a musician, and Ingrid published a photo memoir of Jim that carries the same title as the song.
Listen to “Time in a Bottle”