You Don’t Mess Around With Jim by Jim Croce

You Don't Mess Around with Jim, Jim Croce's third album and his first for a major label, reached ABC in April 1972 after a rough road. Cashman & West put together an eight-song demo that got PolyGram to bankroll the sessions, which ran three to four weeks and cost about $18,000. Then as many as 40 labels passed on the finished record, until ABC promotion man Marty Kupps talked label boss Jay Lasker into signing him.

The wait paid off. This is folk rock with a barroom storyteller's wink and a voice that has clearly worked a few odd jobs, and it threw off three charting singles and hung on the charts for 93 weeks, longer than anything else he made. The saddest twist belongs to "Time in a Bottle": it only hit number one after Croce died in a plane crash in September 1973, and in its wake this album sat atop the American sales rankings for five weeks.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.