Yahoo News Rodriguez, singer-songwriter and star of Oscar-winning Searching for Sugar Man documentary, dies at 81
Sixto Rodriguez, the Detroit singer-songwriter whose 1970s music had a resurgence thanks to the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man, has died. He was 81. His official website and social media pages shared the news on Wednesday.
"It is with great sadness that we at Sugarman.org announce that Sixto Diaz Rodriguez has passed away earlier today," reads the statement posted to Rodriguez's website. "We extend our most heartfelt condolences to his daughters — Sandra, Eva, and Regan — and to all his family."
Daniel Knighton/Getty Images Rodriguez in 2015
Rodriguez was born July 10, 1942, to a working-class Mexican family in Detroit; he was named "Sixto" because he was his parents' sixth child. He embarked on a music career in 1967, but his songs — which chronicled the plight of the working class in an era of social unrest — did not attract much of an audience in the United States, and Rodriguez quit music to focus on other kinds of work in Detroit. He achieved a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Wayne State University in 1981 and unsuccessfully ran for political office several times.
Unbeknownst to Rodriguez, his music did find an eager audience — just not in his home country. As explored in Searching for Sugar Man, Rodriguez's songs became enormously popular among young South Africans struggling against apartheid. But in the days before the internet, these international fans knew little about their hero; many thought he was dead given his lack of recent output.
In the late 1990s, a South African indie record store owner named Stephen Segerman (who was often called "Sugar Man," after one of Rodriguez's songs) began looking for the musician. That quest was chronicled in Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul's 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man, which achieved substantial success — including an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature — and established a reputation for Rodriguez in the U.S. The musician earned enough devotees stateside to headline tours in his own country, and he was performing live as recently as 2018.
"I'm enjoying every second of it," Rodriguez said of his newfound fame in an EW interview in 2012. "Malik has done quite a remarkable thing. I'm a lucky man."
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