Ozzy Osbourne’s journey to heavy-metal stardom started with a flier.

Fueled by a love of the Beatles, the teenage dropout propelled himself out of a mundane life in 1960s Aston, a working-class suburb of Birmingham, England, by posting a handwritten sign in a local music shop. It led the singer, who died on Tuesday at 76, to Terence Butler, a bookish soon-to-be bassist who called himself Geezer, as well as the guitarist Tony Iommi and the drummer Bill Ward.

The quartet found its footing when Iommi noticed long lines outside horror movie screenings at a local theater. It wrote a song — “Black Sabbath,” named after the 1963 Mario Bava/Boris Karloff horror anthology — changed its name and, with its 1970 self-titled debut, helped birth what we now know as heavy metal.

Osbourne’s voice, a forlorn, unpolished moan, perfectly suited the occult-themed lyrics that the singer and Butler began writing. Onstage, though, he was almost bubbly — grinning, clapping and handily dispelling any sort of menacing mystique.

Black Sabbath fired Osbourne in 1979, citing his offstage excesses, but the parting turned into a springboard. Sharon Arden — the daughter of Sabbath’s manager at the time, Don, and Osbourne’s future wife and steadfast manager — began helping him assemble his own band. A young guitar prodigy named Randy Rhoads became the linchpin of the new group, and with “Blizzard of Ozz” in 1980, the singer kicked off a solo career that would turn him into a worldwide icon.

Through the years, as collaborators came and went, Osbourne always found new ways to reinvent himself. Here are 12 tracks that sum up Ozzy’s half-century-plus trip to the dark side and beyond. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)