Jim Croce: Jim Croce. Soundtrack: Django Unchained. Jim Croce was born on Sunday, January 10th, 1943 in a working-class section of Philadelphia, in an Italian-American family. While a teenager, he began playing the accordion, and then learning to play an acoustic guitar when he was 18. After a short stint in the U.S. Army, where he supposedly met the character who inspired the song "Bad Bad Leroy Brown," Jim entered Villanova University...