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Searching for Sugar Man 2010 Sweden/U.K. (87 minutes) written, directed, edited and co-produced by Malik Bendjelloul; filmed by Camilla Skagerström.

The voice and lyrics of an American pop musician inspired disaffected 1970s Afrikaner youth and others who opposed authority and apartheid in South Africa.

Most Americans never heard of him.

Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American Detroiter, became best known in South Africa for his first album Cold Fact. His acoustic guitar tunes swing and his lyrics have an edge. Americans who grew up at the time or are familiar with its popular music easily will recognize Rodriguez’s period sound and his lyrics’ period slang and attitude.

The artist cut three albums in the early 1970s. Despite the expectations and high hopes of local supporters and record company cognoscenti who were sure they had discovered another Bob Dylan, the records were, in the words of former Motown records chairman Clarence Avant, ‘monumental flops.’

After this, Rodriguez got on with his life in Detroit. In his quiet self-deprecating manner, he said, ‘I pretty much went back to work.’ This work is the hard manual labor he has done most of his life to support his family.

Meanwhile, unknown to Rodriguez and just about everyone else in the U.S.—though someone somewhere had to have been making a lot of money—Rodriguez became ‘monumentally’ popular in South Africa.

‘To many South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives,’ said Stephen ‘Sugar’ Segerman, who said he got his nickname when army comrades found it easier to refer to him as ‘Sugar Man,’ the lead song on Cold Fact, than Segerman. They later shortened this to ‘Sugar.’

The besieged police state that was the apartheid-gripped, internationally isolated 1970s Republic of South Africa could not have been more different from the U.S. at the time. Rodriguez’s catchy tunes with lyrics that referenced sex, drugs and young peoples’ angst had passed Americans by but were a new thing to young South Africans.

Rodriguez and his music captured their imagination.  

‘Any revolution needs an anthem, and in South Africa, Cold Fact was the album that gave people permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently,’ said South African music writer Craig Bartholomew-Strydom.

South African authorities controlled the country’s radio airwaves at the time and everything they did to limit Rodriguez’s exposure—including manually incising ‘offending’ tracks which made reference to sex and drugs on vinyl record albums produced locally or imported from abroad—just enhanced the singer’s popularity.

South Africans only had heard his records. In the political climate of the day, it would not have been unusual for an artist like Rodriguez to be denied entry or to refuse to come to the country. When it became apparent he no longer was producing songs, young South Africans began to believe rumors that Rodriguez had died or killed himself, like Jimi Hendrix, Phil Ochs, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.

And like those legends, he stayed young in people’s minds and also became popular to younger listeners.

In the 1990s Bartholomew-Strydom turned his journalistic skills to the task of figuring out what actually became of Rodriguez. He was joined in his effort by Segerman, a self-described lifelong Rodriguez fan.

Music writer Craig Bartholomew-Strydom and lifelong Rodriguez fan Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman.

Segerman created a Web site, ‘The Great Rodriguez Hunt’; he put Rodriguez’s image on milk cartons. Bartholomew at first tried to ‘follow the money.’ The songs are filled with references to places. Bartholomew-Strydom traveled the globe trying to track him down. He finally hit pay dirt when he followed up a name in Rodriguez’s song ‘Inner City Blues’:

‘Met a girl from Dearborn,

            Early six this morn’,

A cold fact.’

This South African wondered whether ‘Dearborn’ is a place. It turned out to be a place in Wayne County, Michigan, not far from Detroit.

He located Mike Theodore in Detroit and reached him by telephone from South Africa. Theodore has known Rodriguez since the 1960s; he had co-produced Cold Fact. Bartholomew-Strydom asked Theodore for specifics about the purported theatrical death that Rodriguez’s South African fans had imagined. Did he set himself alight or shoot himself on stage?

Rodriguez dead? Theodore asked rhetorically. ‘The principal artist known as Sixto Rodriguez is alive and kicking, and living in Detroit,’ he said.

Bartholomew-Strydom had found his quarry, solved the mystery, and could finish his Rodriguez story, ‘Looking for Jesus.’

Malik Bendjelloul’s AcademyAward and BAFTA-winning documentary tells the incredible tale of how Bartholomew-Strydom and Segerman tracked down this obscure music legend whom they and many other fans believed to be long dead.

Even more extraordinary is the calmly centered, unassuming man Searching for Sugar Man reveals behind the legend and the life his tale took on in the U.S. and South Africa after Bartholomew-Strydom’s story ran.

As Rodriguez’s Detroit employer and friend Rick Emmerson said:

‘Even if his musical hopes were dashed, the spirit remained. And he had to keep finding a place, refining the process of how to apply himself. He knew there was something more.’