Archie Roach – Looking For Butter Boy

Songs are at the core of Aboriginal culture. As Bruce Chatwin explains in his book Songlines, the creation myths of Australia’s native peoples tell of totemic beings who traveled the continent in what they call the Dreamtime, singing the name of everything they encountered, not only bringing the world into existence, but marking an ancestral trail of words and music that functions as both a geographical and spiritual map.

On his third album, Aboriginal singer-songwriter Archie Roach ventures forth to assert that legacy from the perspective of his own strange, sad and beautiful life. His 1992 debut, Charcoal Lane, told the heartbreaking story of how Roach (like many other mixed race children) was taken away from his parents at the age of three, part of a policy the Australians termed “assimilation.” His second album, Jamu Dreaming, was a more hopeful celebration of his ancestry and search for justice.

Produced by Malcolm Burn, Looking For Butter Boy was recorded with a small band at a guest house in Port Fairy on the Australian coast. It’s a perfect setting for Roach’s most mature, relaxed and expansive set so far. And Roach’s voice — a burnished liquid wonder that has reminded reviewers of such fellow masters of emotion as Ray Charles, George Jones and Aaron Neville — bursts forth from the atmospheric swaying of guitars, mandolin, lap steel, drums and percussion like a rainstorm. at once tender and fierce, ancient and new.

Roach’s songs are mostly autobiographical, seemingly simple catalogs of people and places that become bigger and stronger as the details draw you in. On “A Child Was Born Here”, he journeys through the scattered haunts of stolen children. On “F Troop”, he revisits the Charcoal Lane neighborhood of his youth and recalls the bittersweet moment he met his brother for the first time. And on the album’s most poignant track, “Louis St. John”, he joins with his wife, singer Ruby Hunter, in a mournful affirmation of the persistence of the human spirit.