In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie unpacks the story of South Africa's obsession with Rodriguez. The article was first published on the Brand South Africa website on 21 February 2013. Click here to view more of Davie's work.
South Africa’s most unlikely export must be Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter from Detroit in the US. The Mexican-American cut two albums in the early 1970s which went nowhere in his homeland but were a huge hit in South Africa, culminating in the 2012 hit movie Searching for Sugarman.
Movie Poster
On stage in Johannesburg during his February 2013 tour he said: “The last time I was this happy was the last time I was in South Africa.” That was in 2008.
After his albums, Cold Fact and Coming from Reality, flopped in the US, he disappeared for decades into a working class suburb of Detroit where he still lives, continuing his work as a labourer on construction sites, until two South Africans went searching for him.
Album Cover
The discovery of the aged hippie has the quality of a miracle, with a man who was thought to have died, rising from the...
