Black Sabbath members reunite with Bill Ward at Grammy event

Black Sabbath were honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy at the “Grammy Salute to Music Legends” ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Saturday night (May 11th), and the evening saw Sabbath members Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler reunite with estranged drummer Bill Ward.

The special award, which “honors performers who have made contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording,” was first announced back in December. Ozzy Osbourne was absent from the event as he recovers from injuries he sustained in a fall at home, and the band Rival Sons performed in honor of Sabbath, rocking a medley of “War Pigs”, “Changes”, and “Paranoid”. Rival Sons had opened for Sabbath during the band’s farewell tour.

Ward was slated to be part of Sabbath’s 2013 final album, 13, and farewell tour, which wrapped up in early 2017, but was ousted from the band in 2012 as the result of a contract dispute, among other reasons.

While Ward never ended up performing with Sabbath again, the three members previously reunited at the Ivor Novello Awards in London in 2015.

The “Grammy Salute to Music Legends” ceremony will air on PBS later this year. Both Iommi and Butler posted photos of the three founding Sabbath members at the Grammy event on their Twitter pages. See below.