ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥

Croce, the 50-year-old son of the late 1960s singer-songwriter Jim Croce, is not merely singing his father’s songs.

He’s connecting the dots between father and son, who despite never really knowing one another shared a musical bond.

“I got to know him by the music he listened to,� Croce said, recounting how he grew up listening to his father’s music and the music of the artists that influenced his dad. “That was such a powerful way to get to know your father.�

“While I play a lot of my father’s music — I certainly touch on the hits — the real point of the show is this connection that I found with my father and his music through his record collection,� Croce said.

Not only the records that his mom, Ingrid, kept neatly organized alphabetically on a shelf, but the nearly 200 reel-to-reel tapes she kept in her office of his father singing covers of fairly obscure artists — songs that the younger Croce also sang.

“That was not so much the epiphany; I grew up listening to those records, putting them on not really thinking ‘This is my dad’s record collection’ when I was listening to Otis Redding or James Brown or Woody Guthrie,� Croce said.

The epiphany came when he found the tapes about 20 years ago. They were of Jim Croce recording himself singing songs on an old Wallensak reel-to-reel from his living room.

“I came across this one where it gave me chills. He was performing all these really obscure songs by obscure artists and I had performed probably 75% of those exact songs. And they were not mainstream,� Croce said.

There was Fats Waller’s jazzy “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew� that A.J. Croce had recorded on a demo for one of his first records.

“It’s a really obscure Fats Waller song. It’s not ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ ‘Honesuckle Rose,’ one of the more famous ones,� Croce said.

The recordings included covers of early 20th century jazz and blues singer Bessie Smith, Chicago bluesman Jimmy Rogers and blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt — artists whose songs were on the younger Croce’s playlist as well.

“It wasn’t just the artists but the actual songs,� he said. “And I realized we had really similar tastes in music and I felt a connection at that moment that I had never felt.�

Jim Croce did what all artists do when they are making their way: they play other people’s songs, hoping the audience will indulge them an original here and there.

The senior Croce had spent nearly a decade performing in small bars and clubs mostly on weekends before hitting it big with his third album “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim.� That 1972 album, released when A.J. was a year old, spun off three charted singles including two No. 1s — “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,� which went to No. 1 in July 1973, and “Time in a Bottle,� which was released as a single months after Croce died in a plane crash in September 1973. His death came eight days before his son turned 2.

Jim Croce wrote “Time in a Bottle� for his son soon after learning that his wife was pregnant.

“ ‘Time in a Bottle’ is always emotional for me,� A.J. Croce said. “Right before I begin performing the song, I feel this weight. It’s an emotional thing and some sort of subconscious thing that I can’t put my finger on and I have to just forget as soon as I step up to the microphone.�

In “Croce Plays Croce,� A.J. Croce tells stories about his father, many of them gleaned from those reel-to-reel tapes.

“He would hit record with Cheech & Chong at the house or it could be another songwriter, a good friend,� Croce said. “You would hear conversation and then you would hear music. I love telling the stories and I think it’s fun for people to hear where these songs came from.�