Ronnie James Dio | Heavy-metal singer, 67

Ronnie James Dio, 67, a singer with the heavy-metal bands Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and Dio, whose powerful vocal style and attachment to demonic imagery made him a genre mainstay, died Sunday of stomach cancer in Los Angeles.

Mr. Dio was known as much for his vocal prowess as for his stage persona. He sang about devils, defiance, and the glory of rock-and-roll with a voice that rose to a bombastic vibrato. He is credited with popularizing the "devil horn" hand gesture - index and pinkie fingers up, everything else clenched in a fist - as a symbol of metal's occultlike worship of everything scary and heavy.

Ronald James Padavona was born in Portsmouth, N.H., and grew up in Cortland, N.Y. He took his stage name in tribute to the gangster Johnny Dio and began his career in rockabilly bands in the late 1950s. By the early 1970s, his group Elf became a regular opening act for the British band Deep Purple.

When Ozzy Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, Mr. Dio replaced him, staying until 1982. By then he had his own group, Dio. Its first album, Holy Diver, was released in 1983. In various lineup configurations, Dio released material into the mid-2000s.

Mr. Dio briefly rejoined Black Sabbath in the early 1990s, singing on its 1992 album, Dehumanizer, and in 2006 he began playing again with members of that band, naming the group Heaven and Hell after the title of the first Black Sabbath album on which he had appeared.

Heaven and Hell toured widely and released one album, The Devil You Know, in 2009.

- N.Y. Times News Service