Sixto Rodriguez, the singer-songwriter who rose to fame as the subject of the 2012 Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man,” died Tuesday at age 81.
His death was announced on his official website: “It is with great sadness that we, in Sugarman. org, announce that Sixto Díaz Rodríguez passed away today. We extend our deepest condolences to his daughters, Sandra, Eva and Regan, and to his entire family.
The cause of death is not stated.
Playing the role of Rodriguez, the Detroit-born artist developed an idiosyncratic mix of confessional folk and psychedelic soul on a pair of albums that launched little attention in the early 1970s. Rodriguez retired from music to accept manual jobs in his hometown, but those records uncovered something unlikely in South Africa, earning him a cult following that peaked in the early 2010s with the release of “Searching for Sugar Man. “
While celebrating and tearing apart myths that arose in the absence of hard facts, the film brought Rodriguez to a large foreign audience for the first time. A resounding success that eventually won the Oscar for documentary feature. In its review, the Times called the film “an indelible portrait of an artist who was given the opportunity to become famous. “
Following the success of the film, Rodriguez returned to live performances, appearing on “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and playing concerts until the late 2010s.
The son of Mexican immigrants, Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was born in Detroit on July 10, 1942. He began playing guitar as a teenager, releasing the single “I’ll Slip Away” on Impact Records in 1967; the album is attributed to “Rod Riguez”. A pair of music producers, Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, saw Rodriguez play at a local club called The Sewer and took him to Sussex Records, a subsidiary of the gum label Buddha started. former Motown executive Clarence Avant.
Rodriguez recorded his 1970 album, “Cold Fact”, with production by Theodore and Coffey. Equal portions of comfortable soul and whiny folk, “Cold Fact” contained songs like the mind-blowing “Sugar Man” that supposedly played at home alongside Jose Feliciano, Stevie Wonder or Cat Stevens on AM radio, the funky enough beat to be sampled through Nas in his song “You’re Da Man” in 2001, but Sussex failed to generate interest in the album. Rodriguez traveled to London to leave a follow-up, “Coming From Reality”, but a few months after its release in 1971, Sussex released him from his contract.
In Detroit, Rodriguez retired from music. He worked in structure while earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Wayne State University (he would later earn an honorary doctorate from the establishment in 2013) and raised a family. He then worked as a politician, campaigning against police brutality and protecting the poor. He ran for mayor, state senate and city council, and never won a race.
While Rodriguez pursued a life after music, “Cold Fact” noticed its way into Australian audiences. Concert organizers invited Rodriguez to play country music in 1979 and the musician was surprised to notice giant crowds waiting for him. He returned to Australia in 1981, sharing the bill with politically minded rockers Midnight Oil. At the time, Rodriguez thought those apparitions were “strange lucky breaks,” but they sowed the seeds of a cult that flourished for decades to come.
Rodriguez’s music also attracted enthusiasts in South Africa, who found that his socially progressive songs resonated in the apartheid era. In the absence of concrete data about the singer-songwriter — very little has been written about him in the United States, let alone South Africa — enthusiasts have speculated about his story, inventing stories as far-fetched as Rodriguez’s suicide at the level or a drug overdose.
In the late 1990s, music journalist Craig Bartholomew Strydom and Cape Town record store owner Stephen Segerman set out to find out what had happened to Rodriguez and launched an online page called “The Great Rodriguez Hunt. “Rodriguez’s daughter, Eva, discovered the site, which led the musician to play several shows in South Africa in 1998. The online page and performances sparked a resurgence that continued when independent label Light in the Attic reissued any of Rodriguez’s albums in 2008.
At that time, filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul met Segerman and learned that Rodriguez’s search contained the seeds of a wonderful movie. Bendjelloul structured his film as a detective novel, which is key to its appeal. “, the Times noted in 2012, “is how the filmmaker retains a sense of mystery in the narrative. “
The film won the Academy Award for Documentary at the Academy Awards in 2013, culminating in a near-sweep of eligible awards since its premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
“Searching for Sugar Man” has become the rare music documentary to locate a wide audience. The Dave Matthews Band did a live version of “Sugar Man” in 2013 and 2014 — Matthews said Rodriguez was “one of my developing heroes” — and Beach Boy Brian Wilson took Rodriguez on tour. In addition to the network’s television commercials, Rodriguez has directed at Coachella and the Glastonbury Festival in England.
After a stroke in the 2010s, Rodriguez lost his ability to sing and play guitar. In 2019, he was able to play music again, but the COVID-19 shutdown canceled several concerts scheduled for 2020. In July 2023, he made the impression at the level at a concert celebrating his 81st birthday.
Speaking to the Detroit News in 2008, Rodriguez summed up his trip: “It’s been a wonderful odyssey. All those years, you know, I’ve considered myself a musician. But the truth has arrived.
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