Artist · EveryDisc catalogue

Rodriguez

Sixto Diaz Rodriguez (also known as Jesus Rodriguez or simply Rodriguez; born July 10, 1942) is an American folk musician, composer, and poet living in Detroit, Michigan. His musical career turned out to be short-lived, starting promisingly with the release of two albums in 1970–1971, although they barely sold in his homeland, and followed in 1979 and 1981 by a series of quite successful tours in Australia. To the universal regret of musical colleagues and producers familiar with Rodriguez's work at that time, music did not become his professional activity during that period. However, his first musical albums gradually became extremely popular, spiritually and politically influential, and cult classics in a number of South African countries, and during the decomposition of apartheid in South Africa, he turned out to be more popular among the liberal-oriented part of South African society than Elvis Presley or the Rolling Stones, although he was mistakenly assumed by the South African public to have died tragically young, as the penetration of information from the outside into South Africa was extremely difficult at that time. In 1997, already after the fall of the apartheid regime, two South African fans of Rodriguez, Stephen Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, decided to start an investigation and find out what kind of person this "Rodriguez" was and what really happened to him. They managed to find the musician, who had spent most of his life getting by on odd physical jobs. This led to an unexpected revival of Sixto Rodriguez's musical career. The amazing story of searching for the old musician was brilliantly told to the world in the Oscar-winning 2012 documentary "Searching for Sugar Man." This film, combined with modern forms of information dissemination, helped the musician gain well-deserved fame and glory all over the world.