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In 1970, a Mexican-American musician named Sixto Rodriguez released an album in Detroit, USA that critics described as genius. It sold approximately six copies in his home country. His record label dropped him. He went back to work in construction and demolition, swinging a sledgehammer in the streets of Detroit for the next two decades.
Somewhere across the ocean, a single copy of that album found its way into South Africa.
Nobody knows exactly how. The most repeated story is that an American girl brought it over during a visit. Her friends copied it. Their friends copied it. Under the apartheid regime that ruled South Africa at the time, the country was almost entirely cut off from the outside world. No internet. Severe media censorship. International cultural boycotts. Music from other countries circulated almost entirely through bootleg copies passed hand to hand.
Rodriguez's music spread through an entire generation of young South Africans that way. His anti-establishment lyrics became a quiet soundtrack to those who opposed apartheid. By the 1980s he was considered as significant as the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Half a million copies of his album are estimated to have been sold or copied across the country.
Nobody knew anything about him. Rumours spread that he had died on stage. The most common version said he had set himself on fire in front of an audience.
In the late 1990s, two fans in Cape Town, South Africa decided to find out if any of it was true. They searched the early internet. They followed a chain of contacts. They eventually found him.
Sixto Rodriguez was alive. He was in Detroit. He had no telephone, no computer, and no idea that millions of people on the other side of the world knew every word of his songs. He was fifty-six years old.
He flew to South Africa and played six sold-out concerts to crowds who had believed for twenty years that he was dead.
When he walked on stage for the first time he said: "I'd like to thank you for keeping me alive."
He passed away in August 2023. He was eighty years old.
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