Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, better known simply as “Rodriguez” or “Sugar Man”, after the brilliant Academy Award-winning documentary film, Searching for Sugar Man, suffers from glaucoma.
In a RollingStone interview a few years ago, Rodriguez said his vision is now quite poor, but he can still make out some people in the crowd at his shows. “I can still get around, but I take things slowly.”
Rodriguez career is an incredible story, told grippingly in Searching for Sugar Man, about his phenomenal success in South Africa in the anti-apartheid years of the ‘70s, where he’s said to have sold more records than Elvis Presley. At the time, however, he knew nothing about his fame in South Africa and never received a penny in royalties, so continued to work as a labourer in Detroit for the next 30 years until the documentary aired to international critical acclaim in 2012.
Despite performing all over the world today and being more than 70 years old, Rodriguez continues to live in Detroit's historic Woodbridge neighbourhood and lead a simple life.
