In August of this year, the city of Detroit and the Mexican American community lost an icon. Born Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, the sixth child of Mexican immigrant parents who settled in Detroit in the 1920s, he is better known now simply as Rodriguez. For many years, though, he was barely known at all. Rodriguez released two albums on the Sussex label in the early 1970s, which sold poorly, leading the label to drop him before it eventually folded in 1975.

His musical career essentially over, he faded into obscurity, at least in the U.S. In Australia, on the other hand, his music found an audience that it couldn’t find at home, and he toured the country twice, in 1979 and 1981. Unbeknownst to him, his albums also remained popular in South Africa, where his politically charged lyrics resonated with disaffected white youth opposed to apartheid. In 1997, his daughter Eva stumbled across a South African fan site that quickly led to a tour of the country, followed by additional tours in 2001 and 2005. U.S. reissues of his albums in 2008 and 2009 on the label Light in the Attic revived interest in his music at home. His legacy was cemented by the 2012 release of the documentary film Searching for Sugar Man, which recounted the yearslong search by South African fans to track down the artist rumored to have died on stage years prior. Rodriguez’s lyrics, which have drawn him comparisons to Bob Dylan, among others, were undoubtedly born from the radicalism and turmoil of the 1960s, particularly in his native Detroit. As he told a reporter for Time magazine in 2012, “When I was writing those songs, it seemed like a revolution was coming in America. Young men were burning their draft cards, the cities were ablaze with anger.” In a review of Searching for Sugar Man for socialist journal Against the Current, Bryan Palmer writes, “In Detroit this 1960s conjures up images of rebellion in the streets . . . wildcat strikes . . . and the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.” This political bent is apparent in song titles like “Inner City Blues,” “Rich Folks Hoax,” and “This is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues.” The same commitments that inspired his songs later also compelled him to run, unsuccessfully, for mayor of Detroit and seats on the Detroit City Council and the Michigan House of Representatives.

His lyrics were rarely specific to the Mexican American community into which he was born, which perhaps helps to explain his music’s appeal across diverse audiences. Yet, he was surely shaped by the experience of being born into a poor Mexican family and raised in an orphanage after the passing of his mother when he was only 3. At the same time, some writers speculate that his Mexican background contributed to a lack of support from the music industry in the U.S. As Tony Karon writes for Time magazine, “Rodriguez had taken in his stride the disappointments of his treatment at the hands of a music industry which, back in the ’70s, had little enthusiasm for a politically strident working-class Latino musician whose music sounded more like Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ than like Santana or Tito Puente.” Whether or not the racial/ethnic constraints of the music industry have actually changed much since the 1970s, thankfully Rodriguez was able to receive during his lifetime the accolades— and, through his reissues on Light in the Attic, the royalties— which he so greatly deserved. Much of the renewed attention can be attributed to the strangeness of his story, but equally important is the timelessness of his songs, which, he told Karon in 2012, “are as urgent today as when I first wrote [them]."