Sixto Diaz Rodriguez

Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Mexican working-class immigrant parents. Playing acoustic guitar in gritty Detroit dive bars, he recorded two critically lauded albums in the early 1970s, Cold Fact and Coming from Reality. When the records sold virtually no copies in the United States, Rodriguez returned to hard physical labor, working as a demolition worker, roofer, and renovation laborer in Detroit for decades.

Unbeknownst to Rodriguez, bootleg copies of his albums circulated widely in apartheid-era South Africa, where his socially conscious lyrics against political corruption, military conscription, and social oppression turned him into an anti-apartheid musical prophet as famous as Bob Dylan or Elvis Presley. In the late 1990s, South African fans discovered he was still alive, prompting triumphant sold-out arena tours across South Africa. His astounding life was chronicled in the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man, which won the Academy Award and brought him global acclaim in his seventies.