(New York) American singer Sixto Rodriguez, long forgotten before the Oscar-winning documentary Searching For Sugar Man brought him back into the limelight, died Tuesday at age 81, according to a statement posted on his official website.
“It is with great sadness that we at Sugarman.org have to announce that Sixto Diaz Rodriguez passed away earlier today,” the statement read.
The cause of his death was not specified but the artist had had health problems in recent years.
In the 1970s, Sixto Rodriguez released two albums to general indifference in the United States, but he unknowingly became an idol in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.
A copy of one of his records lands in South Africa by chance and his music with libertarian accents becomes the anthem of progressive white youth exasperated by apartheid.
His success is such that for years, the craziest legends run about him, including his suicide on stage by immolation.
He does do a few concerts, which he sees as “lucky strokes”, notably in 1979 and 1981 in Australia where he is surprised to see that the public knows his words by heart. But apart from these few bursts, it remains in oblivion.
Until two fans, seeking to elucidate the mystery of his death, discover terrified that he is alive and bring him to South Africa, where he was welcomed as a hero in 1998, for six sold-out concerts. .
“I told him, ‘In South Africa, you’re more famous than Elvis,'” one of them, Stephen Segerman, recalled in an interview with the Detroit News.
The romantic destiny of Sixto Rodriguez, born into a family of Mexican immigrants in Detroit on July 10, 1942, is the subject of the documentary Searching For Sugar Man, directed by the Swedish Malik Bendjelloul and awarded at the Oscars in 2013.
The success of the film gave a belated celebrity to this guitarist who, after the failure of his albums, had abandoned music to retrain in building sites and construction.
He also gives new visibility to his folk songs, including the iconic Sugar Man and I Wonder.
In the film, Rodriguez seems detached, rather amused by this recognition. But his precarious economic situation is also evident: he never touched a penny of his hundreds of thousands of albums sold in South Africa.
After the release of the documentary, he gave several concerts in Europe and the United States. He is even invited to perform at the famous Coachella, California, and Glastonbury, UK festivals.
In 2008, the singer spoke to the Detroit News about the “tremendous odyssey” that his life has been, saying that he “always, during all these years, considered a musician”.