Sixto Rodriguez, who has died aged 81, was a Mexican-American singer-songwriter described as “the Latin Bob Dylan”; more than five decades ago he recorded two albums in his home city of Detroit, Michigan, but they barely registered and he resigned himself to a life of obscurity.
Yet unbeknown to Rodriguez he had become a superstar in faraway South Africa, where his fighting lyrics formed the soundtrack to the lives of a generation. Bootleg copies of his albums were popular not so much among downtrodden blacks, but among young whites conscripted into the military. A South African soldier once told him: “We made love to your music, we made war to your music.”
The story began in 1967 when, as Rod Riguez, he recorded a single called I’ll Slip Away on the small Impact label. Three years later, billed simply as Rodriguez, he released the album Cold Fact (1970), a gloriously tuneful psychedelic folk-rock classic that included the track Inner City Blues. Local DJs forecast great success ahead. “Inner City Blues should do much to build Sixto Rodriguez, a Detroit favourite,” noted one in the Detroit Free Press.
Other tracks were politically indignant urban folk songs such as This Is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues, which includes the lyrics: “Garbage ain’t collected, women ain’t protected/ Politicians using, people they’re abusing.”
Alas, American audiences were not interested. Even the most devout fans were alienated by his habit of performing with his back to them. At a key music industry showcase he invited on stage a member of the Brown Berets, the Hispanic equivalent of the Black Panthers, to sound off about injustice. It was not what record company executives wanted to hear.
Rodriguez’s follow-up album, Coming From Reality (1971), with a similarly beguiling blend of wry humour, hipster drug-slang and folk whimsy, did even worse than its predecessor. His label, Sussex Records, soon folded and the singer was forced to confront his own reality.
The first glimpse of a musical afterlife came in 1979 when he was unexpectedly invited to play in Australia, where album sales were ticking along nicely. “I’m really anxious to sort out how it happened,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. He returned in 1981 as a support act for the rock band Midnight Oil and to release a live album. And that, he thought, was that.
This was in pre-internet days, and in South Africa, a country largely cut off from the rest of the world, Rodriguez remained an enigma, “a mystery lurking behind sunglasses”, as one critic noted. Fans knew little and the sleeve notes to one reissued CD claimed: “Who or what Rodriguez is remains a mystery.”
Some said he had committed suicide in prison after murdering his wife, others that he had died on stage, either from electrocution or a heroin overdose or, most dramatically, by setting himself on fire after delivering these final lyrics in the Cold Facts number Forget It: “But thanks for your time, then you can thank me for mine and after that’s said, forget it.”
In December 1994 a devoted fan named Stephen Segerman joined forces with a journalist, Craig Bartholomew, to set up a website called The Great Rodriguez Hunt. After nine months, 72 telephone calls, 45 faxes, 142 emails, several months of chasing false leads and an unlikely “Have you seen this man?” campaign on the side of milk cartons, they received a startled email from his daughter: “Do you really want to know about my father?” He was working on a building site in Detroit, immune to the internet, and did not even own a telephone.
A career was reborn, and in March 1998 Rodriguez played six sold-out concerts in 5,000-capacity arenas across South Africa. “It was strange seeing all those bright white faces, all of them knowing every word to every one of my songs,” he told The Sunday Telegraph in 2009. He toured other countries, including Australia, Sweden, and back to South Africa, gave sell-out performances in London and appeared on the Park Stage at the 2013 Glastonbury Festival.
Rodriguez’s story was told in the British producer Simon Chinn’s documentary Searching for Sugar Man (2012), Sugar Man being a track from Cold Fact that tells the poignant tale of a drug addict’s life. The film opened the Sundance Festival and won a Bafta and an Oscar, though the singer declined to attend the Academy Awards, saying he did not want to overshadow the filmmakers’ achievements.
“This guy didn’t know at all that he was one of the most famous artists ever in South Africa,” said Malik Bendjelloul, the film’s Swedish director who died in 2014. “He was literally more famous than the Rolling Stones there and he had no idea.”
There was just one unsolved mystery: what had happened to his South African royalties? “We still haven’t got to the bottom of that,” Rodriguez told The Guardian in 2005. “But we’re putting things together, man. I’m long-term, you know what I mean?” He finally received his dues last year.
Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was born in Detroit, Michigan, on July 10 1942, the sixth child (hence Sixto) of a Mexican father, Ramon, whose family had emigrated to the US in the 1920s and who rose to be a foreman at Great Lakes Steel, and a Native American mother, Maria, who died when her son was three.
His earliest music was playing the Mexican soundtrack of his childhood for parties. Gradually he moved on to low-rent gay clubs and other dives, including one particularly smoky establishment on the Detroit River known as the Sewer where he covered numbers by the Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan.
By day he was a self-employed construction-site labourer, but when he was 21 he lost half the middle finger of his left hand in an industrial accident. Within two weeks he was playing the guitar again. Soon he was introduced to the producer Harry Balk, who teamed him up with the Motown session guitarist Dennis Coffey to make his first single.
When Sussex Records collapsed Rodriguez largely abandoned his musical career. He bought a derelict house at auction, worked in a petrol station and a laundry, and, according to some reports, “took part in Indian pow-wows throughout Michigan”. In his thirties he completed a degree in philosophy at Wayne University, Detroit.
In 1980 he received a $27,500 settlement after suffering extensive injuries to his face while handcuffed and in police custody. That led to a two-and-a-half decade involvement in local politics. He stood to be mayor of Detroit and the city council on several occasions, though with little success. His 1993 campaign leaflet asked: “Do you hunger and thirst after righteousness?” adding: “He cares, how about you?”
Searching for Sugarman finally brought Rodriguez recognition in the US, with appearances on television programmes such as The Late Show with David Letterman. “My story isn’t a rags to riches story,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “It’s rags to rags, and I’m glad about that. Where other people live in an artificial world, I feel I live in the real world. And nothing beats reality.”
Sixto Rodriguez was twice married, to Rayma Rawa, with whom he had two daughters, and in 1984 to Konny Koskos, from whom he was long separated but not divorced, and with whom he had another daughter. His children survive him.
Sixto Rodriguez, born July 10 1942, died August 8 2023
