Lyrics to
You Don’t Mess Around With Jim

Released by Jim Croce in 1972
From the Album: You Don't Mess Around With Jim |

This version of You Don’T Mess Around With Jim was released by Jim Croce in 1972.

Our Jim Croce Songs profile has You Don’T Mess Around With Jim lyrics from 1972 and most if not all of the lyrics by Jim Croce that we have here at Decade Lyrics.

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Uptown got it’s hustlers
The bowery got it’s bums
42nd Street got Big Jim Walker
He’s a pool-shootin’ son of a gun
Yeah, he big and dumb as a man can come
But he stronger than a country hoss
And when the bad folks all get together at night
You know they all call big Jim “Boss”, just because
And they say

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim

Well outta south Alabama come a country boy
He say I’m lookin’ for a man named Jim
I am a pool-shootin’ boy
By name ‘a Willie McCoy
But down home they call me Slim
Yeah I’m lookin’ for the king of 42nd Street
He drivin’ a drop top Cadillac
Last week he took all my money
And it may sound funny
But I come to get my money back
And everybody say Jack don’t you know

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim

Well a hush fell over the pool room
Jimmy come boppin’ in off the street
And when the cuttin’ was done
The only part that wasn’t bloody
Was the soles of the big man’s feet, ooh
And he was cut in about a hundred places
And he were shot in a couple more
And you better believe
There come another kind of story
When big Jim hit the floor now they say

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Slim

Yeah, big Jim got his hat
Find out where it’s at
And it’s not hustlin’ people strange to you
Even if you do got a two-piece custom-made pool cue

Yeah you don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Slim

See also  Hillbilly Willy

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Jim Croce has released many songs over the years besides You Don’T Mess Around With Jim. Jim Croce released songs from 1972 to 1973 spanning across albums like You Don't Mess Around With Jim, Life And Times, and I Got A Name. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by Jim Croce.

If you're a fan of the music of the 1970s looking for more songs from 1972 or the 1970s overall, you've come to the right place!

About Lyrics and You Don’T Mess Around With Jim by Jim Croce

The lyrics to You Don’T Mess Around With Jim are just the words, phrases, verses and chorus that Jim Croce used when the song was created in 1972. The lyrics to You Don’T Mess Around With Jim have both easy-to-spot meanings and hidden metaphors that have been discussed by the music press and fans, but only Jim Croce and any collaborators know all of the inspirations for the song.

If you like etymology or breaking apart phrases and words, it is easy to understand the lyrics to You Don’T Mess Around With Jim by Jim Croce. The word "lyric" itself derives from the Latin word lyricus, with the actual English word lyrics applied to the definition "words set to music" listed in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms. Continuing the chain, the Latin word lyricus derives from the Greek word λυρικός or lyrikós. This somewhat means "poetry accompanied by the lyre" or "words set to music." You can easily see that by looking at the background of the word lyric, that the "lyrics to You Don’T Mess Around With Jim" means the words set to the music of You Don’T Mess Around With Jim, or poetry accompanied by the lyre played by Jim Croce. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song. However, the singular form lyric is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. Hence, by this analysis of word structure, you could say that the lyric to You Don’T Mess Around With Jim and the lyrics to You Don’T Mess Around With Jim are both one and the same thing. None of this talk about the word Lyrics is really relevant to fans of Jim Croce who came here looking just for the lyrics to You Don’T Mess Around With Jim, but we feel it is still fun to learn what's behind commonly used words and lyrics in songs.

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