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On May 16th, 2010 at 7:45AM, American music lost one of its most influential icons in Ronnie James Dio. He surrendered to his long-fought bout with stomach cancer after he took a turn for the worse earlier this month.
Dio is Italian for the word “God,” and in the world of metal, not many other monikers could be a more apt representation of what RJD meant to his genre of music. His musical legacy spanned an astounding six decades, dating all the way back to 1957. Dio’s earlier bands like Elf and Rainbow paved the way for heavy music as we know it today. He also sang lead vocals on arguably one of the best Black Sabbath albums, Heaven & Hell, after the departure of then frontman Ozzy Osbourne. While his solo work is more popularly remembered for its unapologeticly campy videos and song stylings, one cannot deny the powerful and unique vocal stylings that Dio exhibited.
One of the biggest things that RJD will always be synonymous with is the heavy-metal gesture of throwing up the horns. While Dio has always stated that he popularized the gesture after seeing his Italian grandmother make the horns as a cultural superstition to ward off the “evil eye,” he never said he invented the sign. In a 2001 interview Dio went on to state “I doubt very much if I would be the first one who ever did that. That’s like saying I invented the wheel.”
Ronnie James Dio truly was like a rainbow in the dark.
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