Black Sabbath | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Formed in Birmingham, England in 1968, Black Sabbath was one of the most important influences on hard rock and grunge music. While the term "heavy metal" was taken from a Steppenwolf lyric and had already been applied to bands such as Cream and Led Zeppelin, in many ways Black Sabbath invented the genre. They were perhaps the first band to include occult references in their music, and they began to distance themselves from the blues-based music which was the norm, although they had started their career as a blues band.

Originally calling themselves Earth, they discovered another band with the same name. After renaming themselves Black Sabbaththe group released their self-titled first album in 1970. Black Sabbath was recorded both quickly and inexpensively—it took only two days and cost six hundred pounds. In spite of that, the album reached number 23 on the American charts and would eventually sell over a million copies. Paranoid was released later the same year and cracked the top ten in the United States while topping the charts in Britain. Their third album, Master of Reality, was equally successful and remained on the Billboard charts in America for almost a year.

Those releases introduced themes which would become staples for future metal bands: madness, death, and the supernatural. Although some considered the band's lyrics satanic, there was often an element of camp present. The group got its name from the title of a Boris Karloff film, and songs such as "Fairies Wear Boots" are at least partly tongue-in-cheek. But vocalist John "Ozzy" Osbourne's haunting falsetto and Tony Iommi's simultaneously spare and thundering guitar work would become touchstones for scores of hard rock bands.

Sabbath released three more albums as well as a greatest hits collection before Osbourne left the group in 1977, reportedly because of drug and alcohol problems. He returned in 1978, then left permanently the following year to start his own solo career. Initially, both Osbourne and the new version of Black Sabbath enjoyed some degree of commercial success, although many of the Sabbath faithful insisted the whole greatly exceeded the sum of its parts. During the 1980s the band would go through an astonishing array of lineup changes and their popularity plummeted.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Soundgarden, Helmet, Nirvana, and others in the grunge and resurgent hard rock movements demonstrated that they had been heavily influenced by the early Black Sabbath, and this effectively rehabilitated the band's reputation. While Sabbath had often been viewed as a dated version of the arena rock of the 1970s, grunge indicated not only that their music remained vibrant, but also that it bore many surprising similarities to the Sex Pistols, Stooges, and other punk and proto-punk bands. Sabbath became heroes to a new generation of independent and alternative bands, and the group's first albums enjoyed an enormous resurgence in popularity. Their music returned to many radio stations and was even featured in television commercials. Osbourne organized Ozzfest, an annual and very successful tour which featured many of the most prominent heavy metal and hard rock acts, as well as his own band. Iommi continued to record and tour with Black Sabbath into the late 1990s, although he was the only original member, and listeners and audiences remained largely unimpressed.

Black, Shirley Temple
Temple, Shirley

Bashe, Philip. Heavy Metal Thunder: The Music, Its History, Its Heroes. Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1985.

Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1993.

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