Johnny Rodriguez, Country Music Star, Dies at 73

The first popular Mexican American country artist, he was best known for the 1970s hits “I Just Can’t Get Her Out of My Mind” and “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico.”


Johnny Rodriguez at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Ill., in 1986. The Texas Country Music Hall of Fame described him as the “greatest and most memorable Chicano Country singer of all time.”Credit...Paul Natkin/Getty Images

By Livia Albeck-Ripka
Published May 11, 2025
Updated May 13, 2025, 5:19 p.m. ET

Johnny Rodriguez, who became the first Mexican American country music star with a string of hits, died on Friday. He was 73. … His daughter, Aubry Rodriguez, announced his death on social mediabut did not cite a cause.

Mr. Rodriguez rose to fame in the 1970s and was best known for the hits “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico” and “You Always Come Back (to Hurting Me).” He released six singles that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, and nine others reached the Top 10.

Ruggedly handsome and possessed of a rich, supple tenor steeped in the verities of down-home country music and Western swing, Mr. Rodriguez made his debut on the chart three years before the other popular Tejano singer of the 1970s, Freddy Fender.

Yet unlike Mr. Fender, who frequently incorporated elements of Tex-Mex music into his arrangements, Mr. Rodriguez tended to work in the unreconstructed honky-tonk vein of his heroes Merle Haggard and Lefty Frizzell. One of his No. 1 singles from 1973 was, in fact, a cover of Frizzell’s “That’s the Way Love Goes,” a version of which also reached the top of the country chart for Merle Haggard a decade later.

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