Ronnie James Dio

Ronnie James Dio — Ronald Padavona, born in 1942 — is one of the most important voices in the history of heavy metal, and perhaps the only one to pass through three of the genre's founding bands without ever having been anyone's second choice. His technique has an improbable origin: he studied trumpet for years and always credited that training for the breath control, exact pitch and projection that sustain his voice. It is a powerful tenor, with wide vibrato and clean delivery even at maximum volume — a school of singing that barely existed in heavy rock before him and that set the standard followed afterwards by all of power metal. His path is a succession of institutions. He passed through Elf, joined Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow in 1975, took over the microphone in Black Sabbath after Ozzy Osbourne's departure — recording Heaven and Hell (1980) and Mob Rules (1981), the albums that proved Sabbath existed without its founder — and in 1982 formed his own band, with which he recorded Holy Diver (1983), an absolute reference point of the genre. The visual and thematic vocabulary of metal is also his: dragons, rainbows, medieval imagery, the battle between light and shadow. And it was he who popularised the horns hand gesture, learned from his Italian grandmother as a sign of protection against the evil eye — he never claimed to have invented it, only to have taken it to the stage. He died on 16 May 2010, aged 67, of stomach cancer, a few months after his last tour.