Find album reviews, stream songs, credits and award information for Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath on AllMusic - 1970 - Black Sabbath's debut album is the birth of. While Black Sabbath has negative connotations, there’s nothing at all dark or negative about the genuine Sabbath. The true Sabbath is something entirely different.

Sep 13, 2008 Which albums, in your opinion, are the 2-3 best Black Sabbath albums? I want to get to know them a little bit, and I don't know which albums I should start. Happy Birthday Forbidden! If you're the kind of fan who thinks Black Sabbath died after 1978, or are one of those fans that say 'No Ward, No Sabbath', then you might.

Black Sabbath have been so influential in the development of heavy metal rock music as to be a defining force in the style. The group took the blues-rock sound of late-'60s acts like Cream, Blue Cheer, and Vanilla Fudge to. Black Sabbath have been so influential in the development of heavy metal rock music as to be a defining force in the style. The group took the blues-rock sound of late-'60s acts like Cream, Blue Cheer, and Vanilla Fudge to its logical conclusion, slowing the tempo, accentuating the bass, and emphasizing screaming guitar solos and howled vocals full of lyrics expressing mental anguish and macabre fantasies.

If their predecessors clearly came out of an electrified blues tradition, Black Sabbath took that tradition in a new direction, and in so doing helped give birth to a musical style that continued to attract millions of fans decades later. The group was formed by four teenage friends from Aston, near Birmingham, England: Anthony 'Tony' Iommi (b. Feb 19, 1948), guitar; William 'Bill' Ward (b.

May 5, 1948), drums; John 'Ozzy' Osbourne (b. December 3, 1948), vocals; and Terence 'Geezer' Butler (b. July 17, 1949), bass. They originally called their jazz-blues band Polka Tulk, later renaming themselves Earth, and they played extensively in Europe. In early 1969, they decided to change their name again when they found that they were being mistaken for another group called Earth. Butler had written a song that took its title from a film directed by Mario Bava, Black Sabbath, and the group adopted it as their name as well.

As they attracted attention for their live performances, record labels showed interest, and they were signed to Philips Records in 1969. In January 1970, the Philips subsidiary Fontana released their debut single, 'Evil Woman (Don't Play Your Games with Me),' a cover of a song that had just become a U.S. Hit for Crow; it did not chart. The following month, a different Philips subsidiary, Vertigo, released Black Sabbath's self-titled debut album, which reached the U.K. Though it was a less immediate success in the U.S.

-- where the band's recordings were licensed to Warner Bros. Records and appeared in May 1970 -- the LP broke into the American charts in August, reaching the Top 40, remaining in the charts over a year, and selling a million copies. Appearing at the start of the '70s, Black Sabbath embodied the Balkanization of popular music that followed the relatively homogenous second half of the 1960s. As exemplified by its most popular act, the Beatles, the '60s suggested that many different aspects of popular music could be integrated into an eclectic style with a broad appeal. The Beatles were as likely to perform an acoustic ballad as a hard rocker or R&B-influenced tune. At the start of the '70s, however, those styles began to become more discrete for new artists, with soft rockers like James Taylor and the Carpenters emerging to play only ballad material, and hard rockers like Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad taking a radically different course, while R&B music turned increasingly militant. The first wave of rock critics, which had come into existence with the Beatles, was dismayed with this development, and the new acts tended to be poorly reviewed despite their popularity.

Black Sabbath, which took an even more extreme tack than the still blues- and folk-based Led Zeppelin, was lambasted by critics (and though they eventually made their peace with Zeppelin, they never did with Sabbath). High Programmer Drivers License Illinos on this page. But the band had discovered a new audience eager for its uncompromising approach. Black Sabbath quickly followed their debut album with a second album, Paranoid, in September 1970.

The title track, released as a single in advance of the LP, hit the Top Five in the U.K., and the album went to number one there. In the U.S., where the first album had just begun to sell, Paranoid was held up for release until January 1971, again preceded by the title track, which made the singles charts in November; the album broke into the Top Ten in March 1971 and remained in the charts over a year, eventually selling over four million copies, by far the band's best-selling effort. (Its sales were stimulated by the belated release of one of its tracks, 'Iron Man,' as a U.S. Single in early 1972; the 45 got almost halfway up the charts, the band's best showing for an American single.) Master of Reality, the third album, followed in August 1971, reaching the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic and selling over a million copies. Black Sabbath, Vol. 4 (September 1972) was another Top Ten million-seller. For Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (November 1973), the band brought in Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman on one track, signaling a slight change in musical direction; it was Black Sabbath's fifth straight Top Ten hit and million-seller.