Sixto Rodriguez: A Mini-Biography
And offering perhaps a different lens on Holy Thursday.
In the crumbling neighborhoods of post-1967 Riot Detroit, Sixto Rodriguez walked and sang.
He was strumming a guitar, channeling a poor man’s Bob Dylan in the smoky dives of neighborhoods where you’d clutch your wallet tight. By day, he hauled bricks and mopped floors; by night, he poured his soul into songs that echoed off the walls of forgotten bars. A couple of record execs sniffed around, dragged him to studios—one in L.A., even—and cut two Rodriguez albums in the early ’70s. They flopped. Rodriguez shrugged, went back to the grind, and later scratched out a philosophy degree from Wayne State.
But while Rodriguez was sweating through Detroit’s smoldering decline, his music was burning up South Africa. Hundreds of thousands of albums sold, millions more were bootlegged, until he was bigger than Elvis in a place he’d never visited. The folks in South Africa thought he was dead (immolated himself on stage, one urban legend said).
In the ’90s, a couple of music nerds, playing detective, tracked him down. He was right where life had left him, in a modest house, surrounded by Detroit’s urban decay.
So Rodriguez, now a ghost made flesh, gets hauled to South Africa for a tour. He plays to screaming crowds, lands on Letterman, gets a 60 Minutes segment. The documentary about him, Searching for Sugar Man, lights up Sundance in 2012, snags an Oscar, and has critics tripping over their adjectives.
What does he do? Gives away the money from his late-earned fame and just continues his simple life.
Locals on Detroit message boards said you could still spot him, same as ever, trudging through the city’s blasted streets, still playing the occasional dive, not chasing the spotlight. “Intensely humble,” one guy called him.
He died after ten years of his late fame, shedding his mortal coil in 2023.
What strikes me the most about the story: Rodriguez stayed. He didn’t run from Detroit’s rot, its danger, its slow-motion collapse. He walked those streets, finding something worth loving in that post-industrial armpit. It reminds me of Mother Teresa, wading through Calcutta’s filth, embracing the kind of suffering that’d send the rest of us screaming for a hot shower and a gated suburb.
The average person can learn to accept that he’ll have neither fame nor fortune (though many of us resent it). It’s a sort of detachment, or at least resignation, that comes with age. But to shrug off comfort, health, and safety? That’s a rarer breed of detached madness.
And then here we are, staring down Holy Thursday, the cusp of the Triduum, when we’re forced to reckon with the ultimate act of detachment: God himself, stripped bare, broken, and bleeding for a world that barely noticed. Rodriguez, in his own small way, seemed to have walked a shadow of that path.