Sixto Rodriguez, who has died aged 81, was a Mexican-American singer with a remarkable history. He recorded a couple of albums under the name Rodriguez in the early 1970s, but they flopped and he was forced to follow a series of other careers, including work on a construction site. He lived modestly, with no car or phone, and never realised that he had become a hero in apartheid-era South Africa, where his records were bestsellers, but where his identity was shrouded in mystery.
There were bizarre stories that he had killed himself on stage or suffered a drug overdose – until two South African fans tracked him down in Detroit in 1996, which led to his unexpected musical resurrection. In 1998 he made a triumphant tour of South Africa, when he sang to thousands of fans that he had never known to exist.
That was just the start. He would enjoy even greater success in 2012, with the release of Searching for Sugar Man, an Oscar-winning documentary about his life and the South Africans’ quest to find him. The film’s Swedish director, Malik Bendjelloul, said: “In South Africa he is as famous as the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan. There, he is in the pantheon of rock gods – and I think that’s where he belongs.” Then, at the age of 70, Rodriguez became an international star.
In November that year, his British tour included a headlining concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London. He came on stage that night looking like a veteran rocker, a stooping figure in black hat and black leather trousers, but with the voice of a far younger man. Greeted by an excited member of the audience who screamed “You’re a legend”, he replied “That sounds like a South African accent” – which of course it was. He then gave a set that mixed a variety of styles. He included the upbeat protest The Establishment Blues (“This system’s gonna fall soon”) through to his best-known song, Sugar Man, once banned from the radio by the South African government because of its drug references.
Then there were covers ranging from Fever to Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone (in which he sounded remarkably like the early Dylan), and even the Frank Sinatra favourite Learning the Blues. It was, I concluded at the time, “an entertainingly patchy set, but the South Africans adored it”. Rodriguez went on to play far bigger venues, including Glastonbury and the Coachella festival in California in 2013, while the soundtrack for Searching for Sugar Man became a global success.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, he was named Sixto as the sixth child of Ramon and Maria Rodriguez. His father was Mexican, and had moved to the city in the 1920s to find manual work. His mother, a Native American, died when Sixto was four years old. Growing up in a single-parent, working-class environment, he first became interested in music after hearing his father play Mexican folk songs that often moved him to tears – “I would always listen to his heartbreaking songs,” he said. “He loved music and I picked it up through him.” He began playing on a family guitar, and, he said, “it altered my life”.
Dropping out of school as soon as he turned 16, he mingled with Vietnam draft dodgers and artists at Wayne State University’s Detroit campus, and in 1967 he released a single, I’ll Slip Away, as “Rod Riguez” on the local label Impact Records. He was then signed to the LA-based Sussex Records – which included the bestselling Bill Withers on its roster – after he was heard playing in a riverside club, The Sewer. Clarence Avant, who founded the label, said: “I thought this guy was going to be huge” – and he was certainly original.
The young Rodriguez was not interested in echoing Detroit’s celebrated Motown style, but was influenced by Dylan and aimed for the psychedelic/folk-rock market. His debut album, Cold Fact (1970), began with his drug anthem Sugar Man (“Sugar man, won’t you hurry … won’t you bring back all those colours to my dreams”) and also included Inner City Blues, with its bleak, poetic view of his home city (“Going down a dirty inner city side road I plotted, Madness passed me by … ”). But the album failed to sell in the US, and when the follow-up, Coming from Reality (1971), proved equally uncommercial, the label decided to drop him.
He became involved in a variety of projects, from odd jobs and manual work, to studying philosophy at Wayne State University, where, he said, “as far back as 1974 I was involved in organising an American-Indian powwow”. He also ran for Detroit city council and for mayor, speaking out against poverty and police brutality, and saying: “We’re caught here in Detroit between the cops and the crooks.”
Although he had no record label he continued to play and sing, and in 1979 and 1981 he worked in Australia, where he had a following. In 2008 he told the Detroit News: “All those years, I always considered myself a musician – but reality happened.”
He was, it seems, completely unaware of the massive impact he had in South Africa. Cold Fact was released there in 1971, with Coming from Reality (retitled After the Fact) following in 1976. This rebellious album by a Mexican-Native American singer became a soundtrack for young white opponents of apartheid, and then for a wider audience.
Stephen Segerman, the fan who tracked down Rodriguez, along with the journalist Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, explained the extent of Rodriguez’s appeal. In 2005 Segerman told the Guardian: “If you took a family from South Africa, a normal, middle-class family, and looked through their record collection, you’d find Abbey Road, Neil Young’s Harvest, and Cold Fact. It was a word-of-mouth success.”
Rodriguez continued performing until February 2020, when he gave his final concert in Atlanta, Georgia.
He is survived by his daughters, Sandra, Eva and Regan, and by his second wife Konny Koskos, from whom he was separated.
• Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, singer-songwriter, born 10 July 1942; died 8 August 2023
