New York's Not My Home

Album: You Don't Mess Around With Jim (1972)
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Songfacts®:

  • Jim Croce grew up in Pennsylvania, but moved to New York City with his wife Ingrid in 1968 so they could pursue a music career. New York never felt like "home" to Jim, and he and Ingrid returned to Pennsylvania a few years later. Ingrid said in a Songfacts interview: "It was 1971, and we had just moved back from New York and we had moved into a little farmhouse. We had really no money to live on, we'd left New York very discouraged that our music hadn't made it on our first album, so Jim got a job driving a truck and I was doing pottery in a little farmhouse. So one day we found out that we were going to have a son, and Jim's background was such that you had to be very responsible, and a really strong Italian family with the eldest son to the eldest son had some responsibility to kind of be an example. So we found out that we were going to have a child, he realized it was his last chance to make it in the music business. He sat down at the table and he wrote 'Time In A Bottle' and 'You Don't Mess Around With Jim,' and at least two or three other songs from the first album and put them all down on one little cassette and sent them out, and that was the beginning of his career, really, in terms of songwriting and acceptability and acknowledgment and celebrity. Songs can change people's lives, whether they're writing them or they're listening to them."

    Ingrid Croce moved to San Diego and opened Croce's Restaurant & Jazz Bar there in 1985.
  • According to Ingrid Croce, the idea for this song came when they were driving away from New York City toward their new home in Lyndell, Pennsylvania (population at the time: 138). Somewhere in New Jersey, they parked in a Howard Johnson's parking lot and slept in their car for the night. The sight of the New York City skyline gave Jim the idea for the song.

Comments: 4

  • Jennifur Sun from RamonaDarrell, I hear you but I have to stay where I am. I will always miss, MY HOME: and never go back there any more because when I leave I get so depressed. Take care.
  • Mike from Eugene, OrLikewise here. I been here since summer '94, hoping only to stay for a couple of years. But the direction this place has been headed lately I'm finally glad I'm gettin' out and heading back to my hometown in British Columbia. Good luck in Baker City, Darrell!
  • Logan from Troy, MtI sang this for my old Music teacher who had retired last year. She said out of all the students she had had all of those years, I was the one that she had stories about. She wanted me to sing any song of my choice, and I sang this song acapella for people from 1st grade to 6th grade.
  • Darrell from Eugene, United StatesNew York's not my home either, likewise with any other large city. I am planning on relocating to Baker City, Oregon within the next 5 years, and I will retain few, if any contacts with anyone who has ever lived west of the Cascades (nasty, filthy, rich city-slickers, they are)
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