Jim Croce was popular during his brief lifetime but it took a tragic plane crash to turn him into a superstar. The man who wrote chart-toppers "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and "Time In a Bottle" was only 30 when his single-engine plane struck a tree in September 1973 and killed him, just two months after his first No. 1 Billboard pop hit and two months before his second one. Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Croce tinkered with blues and rock and learned to play guitar, along the way gaining an education at Villanova University, where he was a DJ on the college station. Continue...