Rodriguez may be the most famous folk singer you’ve never heard of, yet the impact his music had on the global political landscape of the 1970s is still felt today. Perhaps Andrew Bond‘s retrospective best encompasses the Mexican-American song writing style: “At times, his music was simple and beautiful, his lyrics pure poetry. Lovesickness was often the theme, but it was always from the lips of a troubled soul.”

Although this talented singer-songwriter’s primary oeuvre reaches back to the late sixties and early seventies, its enduring legacy has manifested itself in the most unexpected, far reaching, and mind-blowing of ways. While heads have been passing Rodriguez LPs around for a number of years in the American underground, a wave of mainstream acceptance in Australia and South Africa dating back to the 1970s has opened up new fragments of reality for the man born as Sixto Diaz Rodriguez.