In 1970, a mysterious Detroit singer known simply as Rodriguez released his debut album Cold Fact. His socially conscious songwriting would earn comparisons to Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens, but in the United States, almost nobody was listening.
Then Rodriguez seemingly vanished.
What happened next became one of the strangest stories in rock history.
Sixto Rodriguez poses in sunglasses for a Sussex Records publicity portrait circa 1970.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Born Sixto Rodriguez in Detroit, the singer released just two albums, Cold Fact and 1971’s Coming from Reality. Neither sold well in the United States, and his label dropped him. Rodriguez eventually walked away from the music business and returned to working jobs in Detroit, including construction and demolition.
But unbeknownst to Rodriguez, his music had found an enormous audience thousands of miles away.
Copies of his records made their way to South Africa, where Cold Fact became a platinum-selling success and Rodriguez was compared to contemporaries including Dylan and Stevens. His anti-establishment songs also resonated during the apartheid era and influenced South Africa’s music and protest culture.
NPR later described Rodriguez as possessing some of Dylan’s and Leonard Cohen’s lyrical quality, paired with a voice reminiscent of James Taylor.
There was just one problem: His South African fans thought he was dead.
With little reliable information available about the singer, increasingly bizarre rumors circulated. Some claimed Rodriguez had died of a drug overdose. Others said he had killed himself onstage.
Meanwhile, Rodriguez was very much alive and working in Detroit, completely unaware that he had become a superstar in South Africa.
The Guardian reported that South African music fan Stephen “Sugar” Segerman and journalist Craig Bartholomew Strydom eventually began searching for the singer. After months of false leads, they received an astonishing email from Rodriguez’s daughter asking whether they really wanted to know about her father.
Rodriguez finally learned about his extraordinary overseas fame in the late 1990s and traveled to South Africa, where he performed a series of concerts for thousands of fans who had spent years believing he was dead.
His remarkable rediscovery eventually became the subject of the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man. The film chronicled the search to discover what had happened to Rodriguez and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2013. Rodriguez declined to attend the Oscars because he didn’t want to take attention away from the filmmakers.
After the documentary’s release, American audiences finally began discovering the singer who had spent decades as an unlikely legend on the other side of the world.
Rodriguez continued performing in later years and died on Aug. 8, 2023, at age 81.
For a musician whose first career had disappeared almost before it began, his second act was extraordinary: Rodriguez lived long enough to discover that while America had forgotten him, an entire generation elsewhere never had.
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