An American audience estimated at 50 million tuned in. Many other NSU students – two-thirds of the college’s students then were women – stayed in their dorm rooms or apartments that evening to watch network television coverage of the ballyhooed “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between rising women’s pro star Billie Jean King and 55-year-old retired pro Bobby Riggs. Monday evening, a standing room-only audience gathered at the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame and Northwest Louisiana History Museum in Natchitoches for “Photographs and Memories: A Tribute to Jim Croce.”Ībout a dozen raised their hands to say they were at the concert that fateful Thursday night 50 years ago. Croce, 30 years old, left his wife Ingrid and almost 2-year-old son A.J. It struck a pecan tree and all six on board were killed instantly. The plane barely got off the ground coming off the south runway, into a headwind, at the Natchitoches airport. There was a hurried exit from the concert site, after an apparent post-performance decision to fly out that night, not the following morning as expected, heading to the next concert site at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. He was admittedly weary of extensive travel on his “Life and Times” concert tour, telling student reporter Melanie Babin (Torbett) shortly before the concert that he was tired after traversing nearly 800,000 miles across the country, and just wanted to get home to his wife and son. An audio recording survives on the internet. Accompanied by guitarist and singer Mary Muehleisen, Croce did a 42-minute set, including most of his popular and emerging songs, and did not perform an encore. ![]() 20, 1973, Croce played what turned out to be his final concert, at Northwestern State University’s Prather Coliseum, attended by a disappointing crowd of under 1,000 students. This time, almost 50 years later to the day, Jim Croce drew an overflow audience in Natchitoches. Photo by KEVIN SHANNAHAN, Natchitoches Parish Journal
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