Killing the Irish II: Oliver Cromwell

August 30, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

Oliver Cromwell was ON A MISSION FROM GOD to destroy Ireland. Historians don’t care for that word “destroy”. “He didn’t want to destroy Ireland,” they say. “It was a British colony. Why would he want to destroy a colony that enriched Britain? The word destroy involves hyperbolic, moralizing.” If destroy is an operative term to achieve a desired effect if destroy, what term should we use to describe the effort to deprive a citizenry of their religious practice, political power, farmland, and food? Oliver Cromwell was a bad guy who wanted to destroy a colony, but historians don’t care for such stark characterizations, because they’re oversimplified, icky terms used by nonerudite nonhistorians who lack academic knowledge or scholarly learning.

If Oliver Cromwell (O.C.) wasn’t a bad man, he was definitely a mad one. The primary driver of his hostility toward Ireland was to avenge the political and religious freedoms and the land gains they made in The 1641 Ulster Rebellion. That Rebellion appears to have begun as an attempt at diplomacy to achieve political and religious freedoms, and to negotiate for Irish land ownership in Ireland, but as history repeatedly shows, every serious quest for freedom eventually involves barrels of one kind or another. The Irish achieved de facto political/religious gains and land reoccupation in this Rebellion, but they were never securely legalized by Charles I.

Cromwell’s Revenge

Before King Charles I could codify these Irish gains, Cromwell played an instrumental role in having King Charles I beheaded, and the Irish Royalists further angered him by remaining royal subjects of the crown.

To presumably garner support, Cromwell politically framed The 1641 Ulster Rebellion as a “massacre” of the British Protestants living in Ireland. Cromwell considered reversing the unformalized freedoms gains the Irish made during The Ulster Rebellion a vital part of his mission from God, and he sought to return the unformalized land gains regained by Catholics to the Brits. He labeled Catholicism a security risk and a religious insult to the British empire. To complete his mission from God, Cromwell sought to impose the good, clean Puritan order to try to finally put an end to Irish cries for freedom.

Cromwell used these directives to invade Ireland (eight years after the Ulster Rebellion), as the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and general (commander) of the Parliamentarian army sent there. The Ulster Rebellion resulted in as many as 12,000 Protestant deaths (soldiers and civilian) in Ulster, be they through direct acts of violence, and the resultant deaths of exposure, starvation, and disease. To avenge those deaths, Cromwell’s invasion wiped out roughly 5,000–7,000 people (mostly soldiers, plus hundreds to low thousands of civilians). So, the vengeful element of his invasion fell somewhat short in pure numbers, when calculating the direct acts of violence alone. Yet, modern scholarly estimates put total population loss, resulting from the long-term consequences of Cromwell’s invasion at roughly 230,000–325,000 deaths, with the great majority being Irish Catholics (a modern estimate puts that number at 200,000 killed, of whom about 137,000 were civilians). Those larger numbers resulted from the long-term consequences of Cromwell’s invasion that include later commanders carrying out Cromwell’s vision by fighting the guerrilla resistance to that which Cromwell imposed on Ireland. Yet, Cromwell’s scorched earth tactics (slaughtering Irish livestock, burning their farm fields, forcing them off family farms, and blocking Irish ports importing food) played a significant role in destroying Ireland.

As horrific as these Cromwell’s actions were, the idea that he personally enriched himself as a result of the invasion might be more nefarious. After Cromwell seized the land The Ulster Rebellion unofficially secured for Irish Catholics, Cromwell not only took that land back from Irish control, he seized more land from Catholic Irish farmers. He seized the land to pay the soldiers of his New Model Army of which he was a senior commander, and as the senior commander, he was allocated Irish land, one plot of land was 5,225 acres. He also used the allocation of land to repay loans the “Adventurers” made to Parliament to fund the invasion, and of course Oliver Cromwell was one of those “Adventurers”. He was given 1,257 acres to repay his loan. He also drew substantial official pay and allowances as Lord Lieutenant and general (including a daily rate while in England and £2,000 per quarter while in Ireland, plus transport funds). So, not bad for a man purported to be on a mission from God.

I am not an academic or scholar of Irish history, it’s relationship with Britian, or the inner workings of the United Kingdom, but the limited research I’ve done for this article informs me that Cromwell was a leader who sought to slaughter the Irish for a religious differences, his own enrichment, and for a broader accumulation of his own power, but does that mean he was a bad guy? It might be hyperbolic, moralizing, overly simplistic, and lacking nuance to say so, but if I were to bullet point this all out on a chalkboard, or dry erase board, I would check, check, check my way to yes, and I don’t think I need letters after my name to arrive at that conclusion.

I think Oliver Cromwell cloaked himself in religiosity to convince Parliament, British citizens, and that image in the mirror that he was a righteous warrior as opposed to some simplistic notion of a bad guy. I also think the difference between the terms bad guy and warrior is relative to our respective eras, as the citizens of yesteryear were more apt to adorn a leader of men a warrior irrespective of the messy details that might lead modern men to consider that same leader a bad guy.

There were numerous bad guys who were declared warriors before Oliver Cromwell and since. What’s the difference, and how have those definitions changed and evolved over time? Norse mythology and historical accounts show that the Vikings and their ancestors valued empathy and sympathy as important virtues, but spiritual motivation of the Norse religion reinforced a mindset of aggression and conquest rather than mercy. The concept of bæðr (honor) meant that a warrior’s reputation and the honor of their kin were paramount, and killing an enemy was part of fulfilling that honor. Did Cromwell follow the same mindset, and does it diminish his bad guy qualities? What’s the difference between a righteous warrior who just happens to slaughter thousands and a bad guy who inflicts suffering with cinematic, maniacal laughter?

Although it may not stop most bad guys, modern man decided to codify the difference between righteous warriors and evil bad guys through Geneva Convention laws, Hague Regulations, Rome Statute, Protocols I and II, specific weapons treaties, human rights treaties, and customary law. This global legal network criminalizes and prohibits acts of barbarity in both war and peace, and it provides greater definition of good guys who happen to take military action versus the bad guys who act in barbarous ways. These instruments work together to try to provide some accountability for serious violations of international law. Whether or not these treaties and laws successfully deter barbarism is difficult to qualify or quantify, but my guess is a modern Oliver Cromwell would have a more difficult time promoting his mission from God to the Brits or these world bodies.

He would’ve had his defenders of course, defenders who echoed modern historian’s characterization, that he didn’t want to destroy Ireland, he just wanted to rip its heart out, so it would never make the mistake of thinking it could be a country again. He didn’t want to destroy Irish citizens. He just wanted to end their form of religious worship and any political dissent they may have considered in the future. Do we have any Catholic priests or political scientists in the audience? If we do, could you tell these modern historians that taking away a person’s political power and their religious practice tends to have an effect on their self-esteem? Modern historians say that suggesting Cromwell wanted to destroy Ireland is hyperbolic and moralizing, and he just wanted to end their food supply and steal their land. To do so, he knew he needed to slaughter their livestock, burn their farm fields, and block their ports to prevent food from getting in. I understand that historians prefer to view historical events from a dispassionate viewpoint, but how is that not an attempt to destroy a country? Do we have a biologist in the audience today? If we do, could you inform these historians that causing a famine tends to weaken a country from the inside out to the point of total destruction.

Killing the Irish: The Great Potato Famine

August 24, 2026August 30, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

When The Great Potato Famine was over in 1852, one million people in Ireland were dead. Most of them were dead from the long, slow, and torturous death of starvation and the epidemics that followed. Roughly 1.5 million Irish residents watched their loved ones, friends, and fellow countrymen die in this manner, and they left, convinced the course their country was on would be irreversible. In those seven years, 1845-1852, twenty percent of Ireland’s 8.175 million people were simply gone, and famine scholars declare it one of the most severe famines of the modern era when measured by mortality rate. It devastated Ireland to such a degree that some argue it took generations for it to “recover” in a relative sense. And according to my stepdad, I compounded our mother country’s tragedy by missing a question about it on a World History test.

“You didn’t even know it happened?” he asked. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to our people, and we probably wouldn’t be here if our ancestors weren’t one of the lucky few to get out.”

“I’m sorry, but it was just so boring,” I said. “The whole subject of World History is just one long bore.” This further outraged my stepdad, and the fact that I still bring this exchange up shows that I still feel some shame. I feel better about it now, decades later, because I think about the ‘just the facts’ style of writing that occurs in World History textbooks. I understand that a comprehensive collection of the history of man requires a facts first presentation that complies with standards and curriculum, but the core of the word history is story. I think it would be a great idea for the team that puts History textbooks together to commission some creative writers to take the data and create a compelling narrative. I know my history now, because I’ve read some incredibly talented authors who wrote compelling books on the same material, and I’ve listened to podcasters who know how to bring history alive. We didn’t learn World History in the classes I took in high school. We memorized names and dates.

“What was the question you missed?” my stepdad asked after he cooled off a bit.

“It was something along the lines of, ‘This almost destroyed the country of Ireland.’ I guessed revolution, as in Oliver Cromwell, and all that.”

“It wasn’t Cromwell, it was a damned fungus eating up Ireland’s potatoes.”

It wasn’t a microscopic fungus that brought Ireland down. It was Phytophthora infestans—an oomycete, a water mold more closely related to algae than to true fungi.

A biology teacher once told us, “All fungal pathogens are fungi, but not all fungi are pathogens.” What did he say? A guy can’t say that once, and we’re all like, “Okay, got it. Interesting.” We need it repeated and broken down. The distinction sounds like one without a difference, like hair-splitting until you learned what it cost. That distinction, as it turned out, could’ve been everything to Irish potato farmers of 1845, but they only knew the first half of my biology teacher’s description, “All fungal pathogens are fungi.” After suffering the initial blight brought forth by this pathogen, Irish farmers turned to 19th century botanists for advice on how to fight fungi. They followed the botanist’s advice by burning their fields, sprinkling lime, and using sulfur compounds to destroy their harvest to prepare for the next, fungi free one. None of it worked, because fungicides do not reliably kill oomycetes, and that was the distinction.

The Great Potato Famine was caused by the phytophthora infestans, a microscopic organism more closely related to algae than true fungi. This tiny organism is called an oomycete, which is a water-mold. The idea that it was a water-mold played a direct role in prolonging the famine, because the 19th century botanists believed that that which ravaged the fields of Ireland was a dry-loving fungus, and they advised the Irish farmers to follow these measures to deprive the fungi of humidity, because humidity feeds a fungus. Water‑molds, such as the phytophthora infestans thrive in wet conditions, so the botanist’s advice proved worse than useless. Yet, modern investigations state that even if the botanists correctly diagnosed the pathogen, and Irish farmers followed their advice to the letter, this nation-wide blight probably would’ve happened anyway. It probably would’ve happened anyway because Ireland’s cool, wet, and humid climate produced long periods of leaf wetness that didn’t just allow the potato blight to spread; it supercharged it and made the resultant disease almost unstoppable.

One million deaths is difficult to grasp, and it’s just as difficult to confirm, because Ireland lacked comprehensive civil registration of deaths at the time. The scholarly estimates are anywhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million, with one million being the central consensus figure. One million is also a round number, and round numbers roll off the tongue so easily that they require perspective. The island nation Fiji, Djibouti, Cyprus, and the Soloman Islands all have populations of roughly one million residents. Fort Worth, Texas, the tenth largest population of the United States has a population of roughly one million citizens. Imagine reading that the entire population of Fort Worth, or Fiji or Djibouti suffered the slow, agonizing death of starvation.

The Great Potato Famine didn’t damage Ireland, it destroyed it, as evidenced by the fact that Ireland’s population was 8.18 million in the 1841 census, 4.2 million in the late 1920s, and 5.35 million in 2026. These more modern numbers include normal migration patterns, and non-famine related issues, but the point is that when a microscopic organism appeared in Ireland, in September 1845, it destroyed a country to the point that it has never fully recovered.

The Horror Story

Another reason I think I missed that question about the potato famine on my World History test was that my people, the Irish, love to tell stories. Ireland has produced some of the most influential storytellers in world literature, and I experienced that love of storytelling in my inner circle. One of primary elements a great storyteller needs is a big bad guy to whom we can all focus our anger, and The Great Potato Famine didn’t really have one. At some point in the grapevine storytelling I heard, a big, bad guy of history, named Oliver Cromwell, made his way into the oral history of The Great Potato Famine. Their “based on a true story” tale suggested that Oliver Cromwell somehow commandeered The Great Potato Famine to destroy Ireland. Only problem is Cromwell was born on the cusp of the 17th Century, and he ruled England and destroyed Ireland 200 years prior to The Great Potato Famine. Now, I’m sure the O.C. would’ve shed no tears over the devastation wrought upon my ancestors in the 19th Century, but he had nothing to do with it.

The Great Potato Famine was the result of an ecological accident amplified by the climate of Ireland and the country’s agricultural reliance on the potato. Yet, with different administrative policies the Brits could’ve prevented that natural disaster from turning into a catastrophe. It is believed that this whole mess began when ships from the Americas brought the phytophthora infestans to the ports of Europe. Some speculate that those ships first landed in Belgium ports, but it soon became irrelevant what exact port introduced the pathogen to Europe as it began reproducing at such a rapid rate that it spread throughout Europe causing some destruction along the way. It wasn’t until phytophthora infestans made its way to the cool, humid weather of Ireland that it experienced what historians call a reproductive explosion.

When Irish farmers planted their potatoes in their normal course of a day, the phytophthora infestans fed off the potato blackening them, liquefying their insides, and leaving them rotted in the ground within days. This, of course, didn’t just ruin some fields, or some portions of the fields. It resulted in a nationwide agricultural collapse of the potato; a vegetable Ireland was too dependent upon.

The population of Ireland was so reliant on the potato that parts of the Irish population experienced almost immediate mass starvation, disease, and death. It was a famine driven by famine-related epidemics: typhus, cholera, dysentery, and tuberculosis that drove Ireland’s mortality figures higher. As high as the death rate was, historians suggest that there was such a wide range of deaths that could’ve been related to the famine that precise counting of actual deaths due to starvation was nearly impossible. Many deaths also went unrecorded, especially in rural districts where entire families perished. One day those isolated, rural homes housed father, mother, daughter, and son families, and the next day those houses rotted with corpses in them, and no one checked in on them for years.

Saving the Bloodline

The World History textbook’s summation of why I exist is that my ancestor, we’ll call him Patrick, witnessed the utter devastation occurring in his homeland, and he left. Patrick packed his bags, walked to the nearest port, jumped on a ship, and made his way to America. End of story. That’s why I’m here today. Horray!

Again, I sympathize with the textbook’s writers need to summarize the history of man, but the textbook version leaves out the harrowing details of the story of Patrick’s travel to America, as illustrated by letters Irish emigrants, who made similar journeys. First, Patrick didn’t just wake up one day and say, “I’m outta here!” This was an agonizing decision that impacted everyone Patrick loved and the rest of his life. Patrick grew up on a family farm, and if you know anything about farmers, you know they don’t give up after a bad year, harsh years, or even punishing cycles. Their difficult lives are such that preparing for the worst of the worst is a part of their daily lives, and leaving the family farm isn’t a last resort; it isn’t even a consideration. For someone to leave a family farm, they must receive incontrovertible proof that they are going to die and end the bloodline with him if they stay.

By the time Patrick finally decided to leave the family farm, starvation and sickness weakened him. Those who were still alive on Patrick’s family farm were ravaged by starvation and disease. His disease-ridden sister, the dying father he revered as a role model, the mother who had sacrificed her own well-being for his happiness, the grandparents he expected to be dead before he reached America were all torn. They urged him to leave so the bloodline might survive, yet they were terrified of what would happen once the last able-bodied member of the family walked away. They all urged him to leave, but that didn’t mean leaving everyone he loved his whole life wasn’t the most difficult decision this young twenty-something had to make.

If Patrick had any money, and most of Irish emigrants didn’t, he probably had just enough to board a ship out of Ireland. He didn’t have enough money for food purchases along the way, so he likely carried some bread and cornmeal for a day or two of some nourishment along the way. He also may have traveled with a change of clothes, but that’s about it.

If he walked the average 3.2 miles an hour, it probably took him nine and a half hours to walk from the parish of Callan in Kilkenny County to Waterford, the nearest major port. Considering all the information of this route, in 1845, we can estimate that it was likely a multi-day journey for Patrick.

What Patrick witnessed on this perilous journey comes from letters written by Irish emigrants to America, Kilkenny Poor Law Union reports, and Waterford eyewitness accounts. He would’ve walked alongside “Walking skeletons” assuming he wasn’t one himself, children with swollen legs from edema, adults whose clothes hung off them “like rags on a stick” and people too weak to stand, lying in doorways.

Patrick witnessed so much death and sadness that it broke his heart to turn away from families with small children, desperately crying out for a small portion of whatever money, bread, or cornmeal he carried on his shoulders. Patrick also witnessed the worst of humanity, as starving parents resorted to violence to feed their children. “These people were not villains,” a Kilkenny relief officer later wrote to characterize what he saw. “They were starving.”

When Patrick survived the walk and managed to avoid the violent thieves and those so desperate that violence and murder were a means of survival, he probably walked up to the port of Waterford with just enough money to board the ship. The sight of the ship must have appeared momentarily glorious, as it stood as a symbol of his ability to survive the walk with the necessary money. That relief was short lived when he saw the dilapidated conditions of the ship before him, one that he knew would take anywhere from six to twelve weeks to complete the transatlantic voyage. Patrick knew that the mortality rates on the worst of these ships was between 20% to 30%, because priests read letters to their parishioners from survivors of those voyages. If he didn’t hear those letters on Sundays, he read them in the Irish newspapers. By the time Patrick spotted his vessel to freedom, he probably heard the “coffin ships” characterization of these ships hundreds of times.

Most of these “coffin ships” were almost criminally overcrowded, almost criminally ill-equipped for long transatlantic crossings, ridden with the famine-related diseases, and worked by inexperienced crews who hated the Irish. As daunting as all that was, Patrick also knew that –depending on the quality of the ship he was lucky to board— the ship might take twelve weeks to complete the transatlantic voyage.

Once Patrick survived the overwhelming odds of making the travel from Kilkenny County, Ireland to a port in America, likely New York, specifically Castle Garden –the main immigrant receiving station before Ellis Island—Patrick was not greeted with open arms. He was exhausted, malnourished, and confused, but finally seeing Castle Garden filled him with tears of joy and hope. The realization struck him that he not only survived one of the worst famines in human history, but a journey that killed tens of thousands, based on eyewitness accounts, and emigration records, and historians’ estimates on the path from Kilkenny County to New York.

When Patrick disembarked, he kissed the ground and almost immediately stepped into a port that in the 1840s–1850s was one of the most dangerous places an Irish immigrant could arrive. Patrick saw luggage stolen right off the dock and other forms of petty theft. He would’ve been shoved and threatened by the throng on the shore and fellow travelers, and he would’ve seen children separated from the parents in the chaos. “They tore my bundle from my hands, and I never saw it again,” one woman wrote home to Ireland.

Then, once he survived all that, he saw “No Irish Need Apply” signs in windows of factories and other workplaces. He later experienced Anti-Catholic violence, including church burnings, stereotyping that depicted Irish as lazy, drunk, criminal, or inferior in general, and Patrick faced political exclusion, with efforts to block Irish voting rights. And this didn’t just last as long as it took for the one million immigrants from Ireland to settle into their country, as some historical accounts suggest this many Irish immigrants experienced varying degrees of hatred that Irish lasted from Patrick’s arrival in America, in or around 1847, to the early 1900s, depending on the region they eventually called home. So, if Patrick was a twenty-two-year-old when he arrived in New York, he may have experienced intense discrimination in America for the rest of his life. But he did it.

He Did It

Patrick beat the odds by surviving the long perilous journey from Kilkenny County Ireland to America, and whatever joy he felt was surely dispelled by those he left behind, but he had no choice. I’m the reason Patrick, and his immediate family, made those painful sacrifices and tough choices, and they are the reason I’m here today, living in the greatest country in the history of man. How do you repay that? We’re fortunate to be here and alive, no doubt, but how do you appreciate it?

If there is an afterlife, and that afterlife has a screening room where we can view the painful sacrifices, tough choices, death-defying incidents, improbable survival of illnesses, and anything and everything the Patricks of our ancestry had to survive for as long as it took to have a child, I think we would all realize that it’s not just luck, though luck played a huge role, but it’s so far beyond luck that it’s almost an accident. Every person alive today has their ancestors to thank for the unbroken chain of good decisions, narrow escapes, and sheer chance for their life, but most of all they have good luck to thank.

My guess is Patrick’s tale was far more harrowing than I could possibly report. The horror he experienced lay in the details of the death-defying moments he experienced, and everything else he witnessed. We can also guess that when he finally settled down, Patrick probably found it difficult to smile or laugh in the aftermath. All things considered, he probably found the rest of his life unrewarding. Unless, Patrick saw it as his mission to live, survive, and thrive for those who made it possible for him to leave Ireland and pave the way for those of us who existed because of him. It was probably difficult for him to enjoy small talk, going to the beach, or any of the other useless things we do to relax when we’re not working, but if he learned how to use the opportunity they gave him, Patrick could show everyone, including himself, that they made the right choice.

How do we properly appreciate the gift of life? It’s such an overwhelming idea that we’ll never be able to find a fully adequate answer, so why try? Decades after missing that question on that World History test, I’ve found is to use the gift others bestowed upon me by doing what I do best; learning the story, researching it ad nauseum, and writing an article about it. It’s what I do, but in the course of doing it, I found another form of appreciation that might be more affirming to everything Patrick did to make sure I saw life, and that is reversing my decades old characterization of Patrick’s plight and The Great Potato Famine’s blight as boring.

Ozzy Osbourne is “That Thing at the Door”

June 16, 2026June 16, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“There’s this thing at the door asking for you?” the brother of Terence Michael Joseph “Geezer” Butler informed him.

“What do you mean this thing?” Geezer asked.

“You’ll see.”

Geezer didn’t get the joke, until he answered the door, and he saw a rain-drenched man with no hair on his head standing on his family’s doorstop. The man at the door had no shoes or socks on his feet, and he was wearing a gown that Geezer assumed was a pair of overalls that the man’s dad probably wore at a factory job. The man also had a chimney brush over his shoulder and a single sneaker on a dog leash. “I’m Ozzy,” the man at the door said. Geezer would later say he thought the man “was not the full shilling. (AKA off his rocker/crazy)” Yet he invited him in anyway — and changed rock history forever.

We can only guess how this interaction proceeded from there, as the two men tried to feel each other out, but Geezer was intrigued enough to invite this disheveled man into his rock band Rare Breed. The thing standing at Geezer’s door posted an ad in the Birmingham musical instruments store that read “Ozzy Zig Needs a Gig.” Geezer saw the ad, went to Ozzy’s house, Ozzy wasn’t home, so Geezer left his home address — and John “Ozzy Zig” Osbourne, or as we now know him Ozzy Osbourne, showed up later as that thing at Geezer’s door.

Geezer, like Ozzy, grew up in a low income, working class neighborhood, and they both had six siblings, but the Butlers did not experience the level of poverty the Osbourne’s had. Those of us who grew up in similar neighborhoods know that we don’t meet many who are lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, and when we did, we looked down on them. Geezer and the Butlers were poor, but Ozzy grew up without basic comforts like indoor plumbing, and he and his siblings often used coats for bedding. As Geezer’s brother alluded, the Butlers probably viewed Ozzy as a lower life form. His appearance suggested he couldn’t even afford a decent pair of shoes.

When Geezer met Ozzy, he had a predicament. He had always been an avid reader with a strong background in English literature, especially Shakespeare, so writing song lyrics came easily for him, but he was not a strong, confident singer. He needed someone to deliver his lyrics to an audience. He had a message, in other words, but he needed a messenger to sell it properly. When Geezer imagined his messenger, he probably dreamt up a Robert Plant, Rod Stewart rock-god type who could seduce listeners into falling in love with Geezer’s lyrics. Every songwriter who can’t sing, dreams up bullet points for the singer of their songs, and we have to imagine that an overwhelming majority of them would’ve rejected “that thing at the door” on appearance alone. Is that what intrigued Geezer? As we now know, Geezer was not what we call a conventional songwriter, so Geezer may have thought that this thing at the door might have been able to attract an audience in the manner the lobster boy and the bearded lady attract an audience to the county fair?

We could say that Geezer was desperate, but by historical accounts, Geezer only had one other lead singer prior to Ozzy, and that man quit Rare Breed once he heard how bad the band was. So, Geezer didn’t exactly exhaust all possibilities before meeting Ozzy. Geezer dresses this decision up by saying he was blown away by Ozzy’s audition, and that might be a fact, but it’s more likely that Geezer didn’t think he’d find a better lead singer in Birmingham, and his aspirations likely didn’t extend beyond the city at the time. He probably enjoyed seeing Ozzy’s unfiltered confidence and he suspected that Ozzy’s economic limitations and resultant gratitude meant that Ozzy would show up and help Geezer build and grow, regardless how bad the rest of the band was. Geezer’s suggestion that he could see Ozzy’s talent from the very beginning not only compliments his lifelong friend, but it suggests Geezer was gifted at spotting talent. My guess is Geezer wasn’t lying, but he’s rewritten this memory in his mind so thoroughly that this is how he genuinely remembers it. We can speculate further, but at the end of that debate we’d be forced to acknowledge that Geezer obviously made the right choice, as the two of them joined forces to create something no one else tried before, and it worked so well that we still talk about them almost sixty years later.

Within two years of meeting the “thing at the door”, Geezer and Ozzy would be joined by two members of a band called Mythology, a guitarist missing the tips of his middle and ring fingers, named Tony Iommi, and an anatomically complete and relatively well groomed drummer named Bill Ward. They would change the band name from Rare Breed to Polka Tulk Blues Band, Polka Tulk, then Earth, and then Black Sabbath.

In case you don’t know the four of them would go on to sell roughly 60–68 million albums (including pure sales, streams, etc.) when they were all in Black Sabbath together. The music of Black Sabbath would also influence the creation of heavy metal and later the heavy, sludge side of the Seattle sound sometimes called grunge. They’ve also been called one of the influential rock bands of all time, and it all started with Geezer meeting “this thing” at the door.

***

“So, this Geezer Butler fella got lucky,” you might say. “He had one of the most influential front men in rock music history just show up at his door one day. That’s luck.” It’s true, undeniably true, that luck and/or chance played a role, but how often do these chance meetings happen in music? We could also say that it wasn’t exactly a chance meeting, as Ozzy posted an ad, and they both met before as fanatical fans of The Beatles. Still, it can be frustrating to learn that luck, and right place/right time elements play a role in defining history, but it happens. The counterpoint to this argument is that we have to be good to get lucky.

They, Ozzy and Geezer, also got lucky that their band, Rare Breed, broke up when it did, because another band named Mythology broke up at around the same time. The guitarist and the drummer, of that band, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, were looking for another band to join at the same time that Ozzy and Geezer were looking for a guitarist and a drummer. (Geezer switched to bass when he saw how talented Iommi was.) Ozzy and Geezer just happened to find a guitarist who is now considered a master of riff‑craft, creating heavy, memorable guitar lines that became the blueprint for metal, and they happened to land a drummer who was a jazz‑trained, gig‑tested drummer whose unique style became a core part of the band’s identity.

For all of the talent that existed in Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler was the conceptual architect and the primary lyricist behind the dark themes that defined early heavy metal. His style was heavy and melodic at the same time, and he was considered unusually expressive for the era. His bass lines often acted as a second lead instrument, weaving around Tony Iommi’s riffs rather than simply following them. Geezer also developed a rhythmic partnership with drummer Bill Ward to create the distinctive “swing” that underpinned many of the early Sabbath classics.

As Geezer described the relationship that would develop between he and Ozzy, Ozzy created vocal melodies during the band’s jam‑based writing sessions, and Geezer would write the lyrics to those vocal melodies. So, they used their talents, gifts, and creative energy to land in the right place and right time of music history.

If we examine Black Sabbath on an historical timeline, we could also say they got lucky to land in a right time/right place hole in time where no one had ever tried to make gloomy and depressing, as opposed to sad, music before. Yet, when we read the quotes from the members, they didn’t seek out a different form of music to carve out their own niche in the industry, and they didn’t plan on being pioneers, it was just who they were, where they came from, and what they knew. (All of the members of Black Sabbath grew up in the aftermath of WWII, and the war-torn, devastation influenced the gloomy themes of their sound and music that just happened to appeal to a large contingent in war-torn Brits of that era.)

In the era of upbeat harmonies, sunny melodies, and that breezy optimism sunshine pop, sunny melodies, and harmony‑rich 60s pop of The Beach Boys, The Monkees, and The Mamas & The Papas, Black Sabbath was viewed as a dumb idea by the fourteen labels who rejected them. The market is so stratified that we usually accept the idea that there’s no such thing as a dumb idea, but those labels all agreed that the gloomy, bleak, slow, and depressing music of Black Sabbath was a stretch too far. The basic sales pitch behind Geezer Butler’s presentation was that in a world that wants to listen to music that makes them smile, we have created a form of music that is so depressing we might lose a percentage of our fanbase to manic depression. In a world of feel-good music, we’ve created feel-bad. So, whaddya think?

For all of the luck, the right time/right place elements, and everything else that defined them, Black Sabbath shouldn’t have worked, not to the degree that some relatively anonymous writer would be writing about them nearly sixty years later. Even a qualified, quality writer would have trouble properly capturing how unlikely their success was. These were four kids who grew up in various levels of poverty who believed that the pinnacle of success would involve them playing in local pubs that would hopefully pay them enough for them to be able to afford a decent meal and a couple of beers to follow. These guys had no formal musical training, absolutely no industry connections, and they decided to play a style of music that didn’t exist yet — slow, heavy, ominous, and socially bleak and depressing.

We can imagine that their immediate success shocked the 14 major labels who rejected Black Sabbath before their first album was recorded and everyone else who worked with Sabbath before their first album was completed, but no one more surprised than the four members of the group. They knew they worked well together, and they gelled to create the type of sound they were seeking, but the idea that it clicked and/or appealed to listeners to the point that it reached #8 on 13 on the UK Albums Chart and #23 on the US Billboard Top LPs shortly after its US release stunned the four fellas. They didn’t really have to “pay their dues” in a relative sense. They compiled a selection of five songs for their first album Black Sabbath, recorded them in one 12-hour session, and they released it. They were just happy that a label signed them, and they were actually able to record an album. That, to that point, was beyond their expectations. The idea that it would chart with no radio play, combined with the critics dismissing it as a crude, simplistic, or derivative effort was beyond their comprehension. Another source notes that Black Sabbath remained on the charts for over a year and sold one million copies in its first run (US + UK combined).

All four members have said, in various ways, that they couldn’t believe it when some people initially started treating them like a real band, then when their album charted it scared them a little, because they didn’t know what to do with that. When they were asked to tour the United States of America, it wasn’t mild surprise, as none of them knew enough to know logical progressions of this sort. They were genuinely stunned. Ozzy described his genuine reaction to this insanity by saying he was constantly waiting for someone to tap him on the shoulder and say “There’s been a mistake, a huge mistake.” Tony Iommi said, “We never thought it would go anywhere. Our goal was to avoid factory work, and we thought we could do so with a few gigs here and there.” Ozzy said that their goal was to eventually get in pubs, so that the pubs would pay them enough to drink their beer. “We never thought we’d get out of Birmingham,” Ozzy added. Bill Ward said, “We didn’t know what we were doing — and suddenly it worked.” Geezer said, “We were just four poor kids. We didn’t think it would last.” All four members were from lower class to absolute poverty, as Geezer said, and that probably led to the level of desperation necessary to make whatever they did work.

Anyone who has ever read anything about the recording industry of this era, knows how this chapter of the Black Sabbath saga ends. As poor and uneducated as the four fellas who comprised this band were, in general, they probably knew less about the recording industry, recording industry contracts, and the manner in which their management team should be handling their financial matters. They wanted to focus on creating the music and let management take care of the financial matters, and their creations 4.9 million copies of the first album, and the second album, Paranoid, sold between 10-12 million copies, by global sales estimates, they were almost as broke as they were before they recorded their first album. They signed a horrible contract, because they were so elated that someone wanted them to sign them that they probably thought if they haggled over the details of the contract, the management team might not sign them.

“We were one of the biggest bands in the world,” Geezer said, “and we were penniless.” One example cited stated that Black Sabbath were paid $250,000 to play at a 1974 California Jam festival, and each member ended up receiving $1,000. As stated, management teams and recording labels ripped off most of the artists of the era, including the Rolling Stones and The Beatles, but music historians suggest that Black Sabbath’s management disputes were some of the ugliest and most damaging in rock history. When the fog cleared, the members discovered that not only were they almost as broke as they were when they started, but their cars, homes, and other personal possessions weren’t theirs. In the most crushing blow, they then discovered that their music, that which they worked their tails off to create, hone, and perfect wasn’t even theirs. After years of litigation and lawsuits, it is suspected that the four members may have recovered 10-20% of the money their manager stole.

Black Sabbath worked for a whole host of reasons, of course, but they were dumb enough and desperate enough to make it work on a certain level. They had a Beatles-obsessed lead singer, who learned the art of melody from his beloved mop tops, a Shakespeare-obsessed lyricist, a guitarist who was missing the most important finger tips required to play guitar, and a jazz drummer who helped develop a new form of musical expression. Their eventual success suggest that some ideas are such a load of crap that if it’s gathered together, it could be used as fertilizer. The four members didn’t know enough about the system to know how to succeed in it, and they got lucky. The fact that they got so lucky that they’re unicorns, should not be discounted here. Most of us should spend most of our young life trying to figure out the system works to see how we can succeed in it, but some of us weren’t built like that, and some of the ideas we have might appear like “that thing at the door” to others, but the question that we should ask ourselves, is a question I’m sure Geezer Butler asked himself on the day he met Ozzy Osbourne, ‘what would happen if I invited this man in?’ What would happen if we invited that weird, strange, and just plain different idea in and explored the possibilities? If we drop an adamant no to all of that, we’ll never know. The story of Black Sabbath teaches us that some of the times it’s better to say no, unless...