This vintage sheet music for Jim Croce’s wistful love song, “Time in a Bottle,” reminds me of an old TV commercial for “The Very Best of Jim Croce” that used to run late at night in the early 1980s.
Nowadays if you wanted to sample some or all of the very best of Jim Croce, who died tragically at age 30 in a 1973 plane crash, you could open up Spotify or another streaming music app, maybe cue up a CD, if you’re old school. But back in the day, back in the 70s and 80s and even into the 90s, there would be TV commercials advertising mail order-only music anthologies and artist collections in the form of LPs or cassettes or even eight track tapes.
Key elements of these ads included a crawl of song titles, quick snippets of music, a montage of videos and photographs, and an enthusiastic disembodied voice urging viewers to “act fast” to take advantage of this “exclusive TV offer not available in stores.”
For “The Very Best of Jim Croce,” the mix of song snippets bounced from “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” to “Operator” and “I Got a Name.” When I mentioned the ad to one of my friends from high school, she laughed and declared, “I could recite that entire commercial from memory!”
I was tickled to find the Jim Croce commercial online — most of the commercial, that is. The last part has been cut off — probably to protect unsuspecting web wanderers from thinking they could still send $11.98 to some address in Terre Haute, Indiana, and expect their “two deluxe stereo albums” or 8-track or cassette treasuries to arrive soon.
Still, I do wish the video included ordering information. Not because I want to order the album — which these days is available on eBay. But the “call now!” section was a quintessential part of the experience.
These ads for Time-Life Sounds of the Eighties (and Nineties) and are also excellent specimens of the not-available-in-any-stores compilation experience. And you can tell from the comments that many people still feel nostalgia and affection for the commercials.
Eddie Murphy famously spoofed and paid tribute to the phenomenon of these exclusive TV offers in a 1981 “Saturday Night Live” sketch advertising “Buh Weet Sings,” a fictional collection of songs performed in Murphy’s irrepressible Buckwheat style. I can never hear the Commodores song “Three Times a Lady” without also thinking of Eddie Murphy, eyes twinkling, crooning “Fee Tines a Mady.” Even the mail order address in the sketch is run through a Buh Weet translator. Here’s a post on Ultimate Classic Rock about the origin and impact of the sketch and Murphy’s Buckwheat. I think you’re out of luck if you have a hankering for a “Buh Weet Sings” songbook, but it is possible to find original sheet music for Eddie Murphy’s single, “Party All the Time.”
As for my vintage “Time in a Bottle” sheet music, which I found (of course) at a library sale, it’s a gentle, haunting arrangement, quite lovely to play on the piano. It even has the mystical coda that wafts off into silence. And now there’s this not so new-fangled invention called the internet, where you can act now or wait until later to find your own copy of the original music sheet, or even order the music notation to be delivered instantly as a digital download.
Where to find it:
“Time in a Bottle”
Words and music by Jim Croce
VINTGE SHEET MUSIC: find vintage sheet music for “Time in a Bottle” on eBay or Amazon.
Publisher: Blendingwell Music, Inc. and American Broadcasting Music, Inc.
Product number: 1519-3
Status (2025): Out of print
SONGBOOK: find piano/vocal/guitar sheet music for “Time in a Bottle” and other Jim Croce songs in the Jim Croce Anthology, which features recollections by Ingrid Croce about the stories behind her late husband’s songs.
Publisher: Hal Leonard (2009)
ISBN: 1423483022
Status (2025): In print
DIGITAL DOWNLOADS: sheet music for “Time in a Bottle” available for purchase as a digital download on MusicNotes or SheetMusicPlus.
So Many Songbooks 