A.J. Croce Artistfacts

September 28, 1971
A.J. is Jim Croce's only child. He was born in 1971, two years before Jim died in a plane crash at age 30. Like his dad, A.J. is a singer, songwriter and musician.
He started performing when he was just 15. In 1989, at age 18, he was an opening act for BB King, which led to gigs touring with Taj Mahal and Ray Charles. He released his self-titled debut solo album in 1993.
A.J. Croce can see only out of his left eye, and that vision is limited. He went completely blind at age 4 after his mother sent him to a boarding school to keep him away from her abusive boyfriend. He developed an ear infection that went untreated and caused him to lose his sight. "The events that led to my blindness were even more traumatic than the blindness itself," he told Blind Abilities.

Sight in his left eye started coming back a few years later, and he began playing piano at 10, inspired by Ray Charles.
Determined to establish his own identity, he rarely played his father's songs or talked about him in interviews until around 2013, when he started performing tribute shows. In 2019 he played full sets of his dad's music on the "Croce Plays Croce" tour.
He is the administrator and steward of his father's catalog, so if you need a sync license for a Jim Croce song, it goes through him. He's unearthed a lot of his dad's unreleased songs and in 2017 he recorded one called "Name of The Game" with Vince Gill.
A.J. covered his father's song "I Got A Name" for a 2018 Goodyear commercial starting Dale Earnhardt Jr. Both Croce and Earnhardt followed in the footsteps of their famous fathers and had to make a name for themselves on their own.
His wife Marlo died in 2018 from a rare and sudden heart virus. They were married for 24 years and had two children together, daughter Camille and son Elijah. A.J. has a routine to make sure they stay in touch. "I've toured through their entire lives, so the connection of our communication on the phone has always been really important, just as it is today even though they're all grown up," he told Songfacts in 2025. "There's a certain connection and a certain time that we speak before I play that's always been really special, and it's worked with and around the music."

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