Death at 81 of singer Sixto Rodriguez, hero of the documentary “Sugar Man”

2023-08-09 17:23:00

The long forgotten American singer Sixto Diaz Rodriguez had found the light again thanks to an Oscar-winning documentary released in 2012.

By HR with AFP Sixto Rodriguez has died aged 81. It was the subject of a documentary in 2012. © PIERRE ANDRIEU / AFP Published on 08/09/2023 at 5:23 p.m.

American singer Sixto Rodriguez died on Tuesday August 8 at the age of 81, according to a press release published on his official website. Long forgotten, the artist had made a remarkable comeback on the media scene with the documentary Sugar Man. “It is with great sadness that we at Sugarman.org have to announce that Sixto Diaz Rodriguez passed away earlier today,” the statement read, without specifying his cause of death.

The singer, who had released two albums to general indifference in the United States in the 1970s, had unknowingly become an idol in South Africa. A copy of one of his records had landed there by chance and his music with libertarian accents had become 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.

A belated celebrity

Until two fans, while trying to elucidate the mystery of his death, discover terrified that he is very much alive, and bring him to South Africa, where he will be welcomed as a hero in 1998, for six sold-out concerts. closed. His romantic destiny had been the subject of the documentary Sugar Mandirected by the Swedish Malik Bendjelloul and awarded at the Oscars in 2013.

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The success of the film had offered a belated celebrity to Sixto Rodriguez who, after the failure of his albums, had abandoned music to retrain in building sites and construction.

He had also given new visibility to his titles, including the emblematic “Sugar Man” or “I Wonder”. In the documentary, he seemed detached, rather amused by this recognition. But his precarious economic situation was 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 had given several concerts in Europe and the United States.