Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, a Detroit singer- songwriter who dropped out of the music scene in the early 1970s after recording a pair of folk-rock albums that hardly sold any copies, only to discover decades later that he had become a music legend in South Africa – a revelation that inspired an Oscar-winning documentary, Searching for Sugar Man, and brought him back to the stage after years spent working in construction – died on Tuesday.
He was 81.
His death, at home in Detroit, was confirmed by his daughter Sandra Rodriguez-Kennedy, who said he had suffered two strokes in recent years.