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 Aug. 8. 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.
The singer and guitarist, a son of Mexican immigrants, recorded under the single name Rodriguez and made his full-length debut with “Cold Fact” (1970), 32 minutes of propulsive, brooding, psychedelic-tinged folk rock. The album featured idiosyncratic songs like “Sugar Man,” an eerie portrait of a drug dealer and his clients; “Hate Street Dialogue,” an anti-authoritarian anthem addressing police brutality; and “I Wonder,” an up-tempo love song in which he sang of “the love you can’t find” and “the loneliness that’s mine.”
