The song's titular character is a 6-foot-4-inch (1.93 m) tall man from the South Side of Chicago whose size, attitude, and tendency to carry weapons have given him a reputation in which he is adored by women and feared by men.
He is said to dress in fancy clothes and wear diamond rings, and to own a custom Lincoln Continental and a Cadillac Eldorado, implying he has a lot of money.
One day in a bar he makes a pass at a pretty married woman named Doris, whose jealous husband engages Brown in a fight.
The story of a widely feared man being bested in a fight is similar to that of Croce's earlier song "You Don't Mess Around with Jim".
I don't know if you've ever seen handcuffs put on anybody, but it was SNAP and that was the end of it for a good friend of mine, who I wrote this tune about, named Leroy Brown.
[8]Croce explained the chorus reference to Leroy Brown being "meaner than a junkyard dog": Yeah, I spent about a year and a half driving those $29 cars, so I drove around a lot looking for a universal joint for a '57 Chevy panel truck or a transmission for a '51 Dodge.
It was the second #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart to include a curse word ("damn") in its lyrics, after the "Theme from Shaft".
Sinatra's version was released as a single on Reprise Records in March 1974[22] and was a minor hit in the US, peaking at Number 83 on the Hot 100 that June.