Number 1 With A Bullet: Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”
Jim Croce - "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" (ABC, 1973)
Known for writing songs that came from real life experiences, Jim Croce cooked up “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” from his life in the military and working as a laborer.
“He stayed (at For Dix) about a week,” Croce is quoted as saying about the man who inspired him to write “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown. “One evening he turned around and said he was really fed up and tired.”
“He went AWOL,” Croce told the authors of the book, The Top Ten, “then he came back to get his paycheck. Just to listen to him talk and see how ‘bad’ he was, I knew some day I was gonna write a song about him.”
Along with his experience in the military, Croce’s life as a laborer, scouring junkyards for car parts, inspired in him the line about “meaner than a junkyard dog.”
It wasn’t the first hit for Croce but it was the first of two #1′s, landing at the top of the chart for two weeks in July 1973.
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