In December 1973, American record buyers were offered a small, snow-covered Christmas single by a singer who had been dead for three months. “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” is a song about a man walking through a town dressed for the holidays — falling snow, Christmas lights, a corner Santa Claus — wishing his finished love affair could be started again. It was not written as an epitaph, and it is not a sad song, exactly; its whole argument is in its title. But nothing released in Jim Croce’s name after 20 September 1973 could be heard innocently, and this modest record, the closing track of Life and Times, has one of the strangest biographies in his catalogue. It began the year as a B-side. It ended the year as his second posthumous single, climbing to No. 64 on the Billboard Hot 100 while the country was still learning how to listen to him in the past tense.
First, a B-Side
The song’s first life was an anonymous one. When ABC released “One Less Set of Footsteps” as a single on 8 January 1973 — the lead single from Life and Times — “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” was placed on the flip, two and a half minutes of winter on the back of a song about walking out. On the album itself, the song has the valedictory position: track eleven, the last word of Life and Times, after the barroom comedy of “Roller Derby Queen” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and the storyteller’s swagger of “Speedball Tucker.” The whole record — eleven songs, every one of them written by Croce, recorded at the Hit Factory in New York in 1972 — runs under twenty-nine minutes, and it uses its final two and a half of them on this: a man, some snow, and a hope he is not ready to give up. Croce, who sequenced the record with his producers Terry Cashman and Tommy West, let the lights go down on a quiet one. It is worth being precise about the song’s home, because the posthumous blur around Croce often misfiles it: it belongs to Life and Times, the album released in his lifetime — not to I Got a Name, the album that followed him into the world that December. The two records were in the shops simultaneously that winter, which is exactly how the confusion starts.
Christmas Lights, Seen From the Outside
What Croce wrote, long before any of that, was a song about being locked out of a celebration. The narrator has recently ended a relationship, and now the season will not leave him alone with it. Everywhere he walks there is evidence of a happiness he used to be part of: snow coming down, lights in the windows, a Santa on the corner, bands playing on the sidewalk, icy windowpanes, tinsel, choirs carolling. The detail is pure Croce — the same man who populated his story songs with pool hustlers and telephone operators here catalogues a small town’s December with a reporter’s eye. But the emotional turn is gentler than the catalogue suggests. The festivities, he admits, have not changed; they no longer seem the same, and the fault is his sadness, not theirs — they are not to blame.
That honesty sets up the chorus, which is less a plea than a plan. It doesn’t have to be that way: the separation is a choice, and choices can be remade. If she could see him as he is — a lonely man walking down a windy winter avenue — she would understand; and so, instead of walking home, he resolves to go to her house today and get it together tonight. It is one of the few reconciliation songs of its era with no bitterness in it at all, no score settled, no pride protected. Reviewing the single in December 1973, Billboard wrote that “Croce’s tender interpretation matches the lost love, I hope I can regain it feel” of the song, and Cash Box judged that “this soft, sensitive beauty is a lot more than” a Christmas love song. Both were right, and both were writing about a singer who could no longer give interviews.
The Autumn Everything Changed
The context that swallowed the song is quickly told and never gets easier. In the summer of 1973 Croce was at the summit of the career he had spent a decade failing to start. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” was No. 1 in July. He had finished recording a new album, I Got a Name, a week before he died. On the road he had grown homesick enough to decide, in a letter to his wife Ingrid that arrived after his death, that he was done: he would come home when the tour ended, quit music, and write short stories and film scripts instead. On the evening of Thursday, 20 September 1973, an hour after a concert at Northwestern State University’s Prather Coliseum in Natchitoches, Louisiana, his chartered Beechcraft E18S crashed shortly after takeoff from Natchitoches Regional Airport, killing all six aboard — Croce, his guitarist Maury Muehleisen, pilot Robert N. Elliott, manager Kenneth D. Cortese, road manager Dennis Rast and comedian George Stevens. Croce was thirty. The party was headed to Sherman, Texas, to do it all again the next night.
The music, of course, kept its appointments. The single “I Got a Name” was released the very next day. “Time in a Bottle,” an album track the public demanded as a single, reached No. 1 at the end of December. And in the middle of that extraordinary, grief-stricken chart season, ABC reached back to Life and Times and issued “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” as the album’s third single.
A December Release, a Quiet Chart Run
Consider the chart page that winter, because no American artist had ever occupied it quite like this. The album I Got a Name, released on 1 December 1973, climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 — and the album keeping it out of the top spot, at No. 1 for five weeks after “Time in a Bottle” finished its run at the top of the singles chart, was Croce’s own You Don’t Mess Around with Jim from 1972. Life and Times, the album “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” actually came from, reached No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 in Canada and was certified gold. Three albums deep in the market at once, and a dead man was, for a season, the biggest act in the country. It is in that context — not as a footnote to I Got a Name — that the December single belongs.
The commercial logic was plain — a Christmas-set song, released in December, by the most beloved new voice in American pop — and for once the calculation and the sentiment pointed the same way. The single, ABC-11413, carried “Roller Derby Queen” as its new B-side, an exchange of flipsides that neatly bookends Croce’s year: the song that began 1973 hidden behind “One Less Set of Footsteps” ended it as an A-side itself. It reached No. 64 on the Billboard Hot 100, spending five weeks on the chart across the turn of the year, and did better on the Cash Box Top 100, where it peaked at No. 47 — the same position it reached on Canada’s RPM Top Singles chart. Modest numbers, honestly come by: it was competing for airtime, in the cruelest chart traffic imaginable, with Croce himself.
The recording explains its own restraint. Where the Life and Times sessions often dress songs in piano, electric guitar and backing voices, the liner-note credits for this track list just four musicians: Croce singing and playing acoustic rhythm guitar, Muehleisen’s acoustic lead, Joe Macho on bass and Gary Chester on drums. It is the sound of the duo at the centre of his music with the pulse kept low — a record that whispers its way onto Christmas radio and then stays there. A live version, sung on the road in his final summer, later appeared on the album Jim Croce Live: The Final Tour, and the Ventures recorded the song for The Ventures Play the Jim Croce Songbook. Because of its Christmas setting, it returns every holiday season, the least-known of Croce’s singles and, for many listeners who find it there, the most affecting.
The Town of Lights
There is one last rhyme in the song’s story, and it belongs to geography. Natchitoches, the Louisiana town where Croce sang his final concert, is a town that had been preparing for Christmas every year since 1927, when its superintendent of utilities strung bulbs along Front Street and built a lighted Star of the East on the bank of the Cane River. The Natchitoches Christmas Festival grew into one of America’s great small-town celebrations — more than 300,000 lights and a hundred set pieces along the riverbank, switched on each December. Croce never saw it; he passed through in September and was gone within the hour. But there is something fitting in the fact that the man whose last single was a Christmas song played his final show in a town that treats Christmas as a civic religion — a place where, every year, the lights come back on along the water, insisting in bulbs and tinsel on the song’s own stubborn thesis. The festivities are not to blame, and it doesn’t have to be that way. Every December, when the song drifts back onto the radio between the standards, a lonely man walks down a windy avenue toward a door he hopes will open — and for two and a half minutes, in Jim Croce’s warm and reasonable voice, it still can.