Tony Iommi is the guitarist and only constant member of Black Sabbath, and the man directly responsible for the sound that defined heavy metal. At seventeen, on his last day working at a Birmingham factory, he severed the tips of two fingers on his right hand — the fretting hand, since he is left-handed. Rather than give up, he made thimbles from leather and plastic and tuned his guitar below standard to slacken the strings. From that forced adaptation came the low tone, the weight and the shadowed intervals the genre would adopt as its signature. He founded Black Sabbath in 1968 with Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, and wrote virtually every riff that carries the band's repertoire — from "Black Sabbath" and "Iron Man" to "Paranoid" and "Children of the Grave". He kept the group standing through every change of singer, including the Ronnie James Dio period that produced Heaven and Hell (1980) and later the band of the same name. In 2012 he was diagnosed with lymphoma, successfully treated, and carried on working. Whole generations of guitarists learned to play heavy by copying what he invented out of necessity.
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