Bad, Bad Leroy Brown (1973)

Time for another round of Throwback Thursday!

This is where we get to listen to some great music from days gone by. 

Today’s music comes to us from 1973

Wikipedia tells us this about today’s tune:

"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" is a song written by American folk rock singer Jim Croce. Released as part of his 1973 album Life and Times, the song was a Number One pop hit for him, spending two weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1973. Billboard ranked it as the No. 2 song for 1973.

Croce was nominated for two 1973 Grammy Awards in the Pop Male Vocalist and Record of the Year categories for "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown". It was his last number-one single before his death on September 20 of that year.

The song's title character is a tall man from the South Side of Chicago whose size, attitude, and tendency to carry weapons have given him a reputation in which he is adored by women and feared by men. He is said to dress in fancy clothes and wear diamond rings, and to own a custom Lincoln Continental and a Cadillac Eldorado, implying he has a lot of money. He is also known to carry a .32 caliber handgun in his pocket and a razor in his shoe. One day in a bar he makes a pass at a pretty married woman named Doris, whose jealous husband engages Brown in a fight. Leroy loses badly, and is described as looking "like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone".

The story of a widely feared man being bested in a fight is similar to that of Croce's earlier song "You Don't Mess Around With Jim."

Croce's inspiration for the song was a friend he met in his brief time in the US Army: 

This is a song about a guy I was in the army with... It was at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, that I met this guy. He was not made to climb the tree of knowledge, as they say, but he was strong, so nobody'd ever told him what to do, and after about a week down there he said "Later for this" and decided to go home. So he went AWOL—which means to take your own vacation—and he did. But he made the mistake of coming back at the end of the month to get his paycheck. I don't know if you've ever seen handcuffs put on anybody, but it was SNAP and that was the end of it for a good friend of mine, who I wrote this tune about, named Leroy Brown.

Croce explained the chorus reference to Leroy Brown being "meaner than a junkyard dog":

Yeah, I spent about a year and a half driving those $29 cars, so I drove around a lot looking for a universal joint for a '57 Chevy panel truck or a transmission for a '51 Dodge. I got to know many junkyards well, and they all have those dogs in them. They all have either an axle tied around their necks or an old lawnmower to keep 'em at least slowed down a bit, so you have a decent chance of getting away from them.

See you again soon! Share with me your thoughts about this theme.  If you have a favorite oldies song or artist, let me know and I’d be happy to feature them.

You can now join in the fun! Just add your Throwback Thursday link to the list below.  Your song choice can be from any era, so long as it is at least 10 years old.