‘Croce Plays Croce’ connects the musical dots between father, son

Croce, the 50-year-old son of the late 1960s singer-songwriter Jim Croce, is not merely singing his father’s songs.

He’s connecting the dots between father and son, who despite never really knowing one another shared a musical bond.

“I got to know him by the music he listened to,” Croce said, recounting how he grew up listening to his father’s music and the music of the artists that influenced his dad. “That was such a powerful way to get to know your father.”

“While I play a lot of my father’s music — I certainly touch on the hits — the real point of the show is this connection that I found with my father and his music through his record collection,” Croce said.

Not only the records that his mom, Ingrid, kept neatly organized alphabetically on a shelf, but the nearly 200 reel-to-reel tapes she kept in her office of his father singing covers of fairly obscure artists — songs that the younger Croce also sang.

“That was not so much the epiphany; I grew up listening to those records, putting them on not really thinking ‘This is my dad’s record collection’ when I was listening to Otis Redding or James Brown or Woody Guthrie,” Croce said.