Jim & Ingrid Croce - Jim and Ingrid Too - Expanded Version (1967-1969)

I just posted the 1969 album "Croce," also known as "Jim and Ingrid Croce." It's the main product of a short period in Jim Croce's musical career when he was part of a musical duet with his wife Ingrid. This is basically an extension of that, gathering up some stray pieces of their musical output from 1967 and 1969.

The main portion of this album are seven songs known as "Jim and Ingrid Too." As far as I can tell, this was never released in Croce's lifetime. (He died in a plane crash in 1973.) Instead, when the "Jim and Ingrid Croce" was re-released in 2004 (yet again), that edition included this group of songs on a second record, called "Jim and Ingrid Too."

According to the liner notes for that album, around the time the "Croce" album was released in 1969, the duo had a chance to become hosts for a children's TV show in Boston. They recorded 21 songs as an audition tape that showed off their musical versatility. They didn't get the job, but the tape survived. Decades later, only seven of those 21 songs were chosen to be publicly released. I hope more of the rest will be made public someday.

Additionally, two more songs ("The Way We Used To" and "Country Girl") from around this time period were released on the archival album "The Faces I've Been" in 1975. So I've added those in.

Finally, the duo performed live in the studio on a radio show in Philadelphia in 1967. I'll bet that Croce made other such performances for radio stations during his career, but for whatever reason an excellent recording of this one appearance has survived while others have not (or at least haven't been made publicly available through bootlegs). Luckily, several of the songs played weren't otherwise recorded by Jim and/or Ingrid, so I've added them at the end.

This is a fairly good album in my opinion, about as good as the "Croce" album from the same time period. It helps that almost all the songs are written by Jim, or by Jim and Ingrid. The only ones that are covers are the last three songs from the 1967 radio show.

However, like the "Croce" album, it's rather short. Even with all the added songs, it's only 29 minutes long.

This is the last of Croce's early material that I plan on posting (unless something new emerges). But if you like this stuff, I strongly recommend the archival album "Home Recordings: Americana." It was recorded in 1967, with just Jim and his acoustic guitars, and it consists entirely of covers of classic songs. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I haven't posted that here because it seems to be widely available and well known.

01 Child of Midnight (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
02 Marianne (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
03 Railroads and Riverboats (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
04 Hard Times Are Over (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
05 The Railroad Song (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
06 Maybe Tomorrow (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
07 Pa [Song for a Grandfather] (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
08 The Way We Used to Be (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
09 Country Girl (Jim Croce)
10 Darcy Farrow (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
11 Coconut Grove (Jim & Ingrid Croce)
12 Bringin' Mary Home (Jim Croce)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15101962/JimCr_1967-1969_JimandIngrdTooExpanded_atse.zip.html

As far as I can tell, this album has never really existed per se. Instead, the first seven songs have been a bonus disc on a rerelease of a different album. Be that as it may, doing a Google search, I found some album covers for it. All of them used the photo and text in the version shown here, but the photo was either black and white or tinted. I decided to colorize it to give it some more zing.