"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" is a song written by American folk rock singer Jim Croce. Released as part of his 1973 album Life and Times, the song was a Number One pop hit for him, spending two weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1973. Billboard ranked it as the No. 2 song for 1973.

Croce was nominated for two 1973 Grammy awards in the Pop Male Vocalist and Record of the Year categories for "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown". It was his last number-one single before his death on September 20.

The song's title character is a man from the South Side of Chicago who, due to his size and attitude, has a reputation as the "baddest man in the whole damn town." One day, in a bar, he makes a pass at a pretty, married woman named Doris, whose jealous husband proceeds to beat Leroy brutally in the ensuing fight. In the end, Leroy Brown learns a lesson from this painful experience ("Leroy Brown looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone"). During the lyrics about the fight, some background voices are heard quietly speaking.

In the song, Jim Croce refers to a custom Continental and an El Dorado. People often wonder what this means. Both these names referred to very luxury American cars back in the day. A custom Continental is a Lincoln, and an El Dorado is a Cadillac. Only very wealthy people could afford these cars, and Leroy Brown was one of them.

The story of a widely feared man being bested in a fight is similar to Croce's earlier song "You Don't Mess Around With Jim."

Croce's inspiration for the song was a friend he met in his brief time in the US Army:

I met him at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. We were in lineman (telephone) school together. He stayed there about a week, and one evening he turned around and said he was really fed up and tired. He went AWOL, and then came back at the end of the month to get his paycheck. They put handcuffs on him and took him away. Just to listen to him talk and see how 'bad' he was, I knew someday I was gonna write a song about him.

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