Toda essa água

As the first four Black Sabbath LPs attest, some of the greatest folk music of the past hundred years has been played not on traditional acoustic instruments, but channelled through solid slabs of wood with names such as Gibson and Fender etched upon their hafts. While so-called folk artists of the ‘50s and ‘60s mostly concentrated on (rescuing from obscurity then) singing rebel songs of the recent centuries, the actual cataloguing of today’s event was left to a select few rebels who were affected enough by the dystopian alienation of urban and suburban life to actually mention it. In this way, Black Sabbath’s own canon has contributed vastly to late-20th Century myth, from their more general 20th Century folk themes (space travel on ‘Into the Void’, marijuana as the new blessed sacrament on ‘Sweetleaf’) to far more specific current folk tales, such as fleeing from murderous skinheads (‘Fairies Wear Boots’), and (best of all, surely) in Geezer’s clever nursery rhyme interpretation of ‘Iron Man’, poet Ted Hughes’ post-WW2 Cold War new-myth.

http://www.headheritage.co.uk