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In 1990 he and his wife, Renee, a performing artist herself and his manager and agent today, took up permanent residence in New York. (Renee took over management of Larry’s career about a year-and-a-half ago at the urging of Earnest Gilbert who recommended the name: Guerrero Management Inc.) Back in 1990 work as a heldentenor began in earnest. Offers came to sing in Guild and other productions (the Guild offer came by arrangement of Janet Bookspan, who along with her husband Martin became Harris’ friends, mentors and coaches), study with diction and voice coaches, attend the Manhattan School of Music, sing with the Center for Contemporary Opera and the Wagner Society – and of course, there were the usual church gigs, which have carried more than one singer over between career moves. But it was his potential as a new heldentenor that began to draw attention. He sang for and impressed Jerome Hines and Franco Corelli, and when he sang in a stage premiere of Faure’s “Penelope”, Bernard Holland of the New York Times hailed him as a “major voice.”

His “devotion and loyalty” to the Met, he said, influenced him throughout the decade of the nineties. In 2000 he sang Sigmund and Parsifal and studied with Thomas Stuart and Evelyn Lear who were running the Wagner Society of Washington, D.C.. The Wagner Society in New York also sponsored two European tours. Interestingly, if nothing else changed, Harris would probably be a fine heldentenor today.

But in 2002 Janet Bookpsan introduced him to Ernest Gilbert, President of Video Artists International (VAI), who showed him off to Matthew Epstein, and further urged him to meet with Phyllis Curtin. This was the beginning of a transformation that redefined the roles he would sing in the future. Harris described what happened this way: “She heard me sing and heard certain things in my voice and offered me an opportunity to work with her. I told her ‘this is how I warm up. I sing all these great baritone arias just to get my voice to where it will perform as a tenor where it will really open up.’ So she said, ‘Let me hear those arias.’ And I sang all those baritone arias, and she said: ‘Well, here’s the deal: you’re a baritone.’ It took someone like Phyllis Curtin whom I have enormous respect for – and still do – to sort of give me permission, you might say, to let the tenor thing go. And I said, ‘okay that’s it’!”

Harris found his fach and with it the confidence he needed to lay claim to the reputation he has earned as an important and impressive Verdi/Puccini baritone. Even before this change, though, before meeting Curtin, Harris’ confidence as a heldentenor was reinforced when Gilbert asked Jon Vickers to listen to him. Vickers made a special trip from Bermuda to do just that. “He heard me and told me something I couldn’t believe,” Harris recalled. “You have the most beautiful voice I have ever heard,” Vickers told him. “That was the greatest thing he told me,” even though the voice he heard was that of a tenor.

Today, Lawrence Harris, carries the distinction of being the only ex-pro-football player/Native American opera singer in America (he’s half Choctaw on both sides of his family). He has over 30 roles under his belt and he’s appeared in opera houses around the country, hoping one day to return to the Met and perform on a regular basis. “There’s no doubt,” he said, “that the ultimate situation is for a leading singer, with multiple productions, to sing at the Metropolitan Opera.” In the mean time, he travels and sings and builds on his reputation just as every other singer. “You have to travel to accommodate the opera companies. But you cope with it. And the only way to cope with it is to remember that you’re really there to serve the composer and the audience. And that’s your main focus. In between, you’re sleeping in a strange bed.”

In the final analysis, those who have seen and heard the quiet-spoken Harris, would agree that he’s a natural for the Verdi baritone roles he excels at – Scarpia, Rigoletto, Germont, to name a few. And his manager/wife Renee says she intends to have this voice recognized on the international scene as well. And oh, in case you think football is out of his blood entirely, the friendly tension that has existed all his life continues even today, but in a different way. Harris has won national attention for initiating his own program which he brings to inner-city youth, titled “From Football to Opera.” A U.S. tour of that program is in the making, as are future singing engagements.

In sum, what was said at the beginning is reiterated here: this is a voice and presence to watch. So here it is: this ex-football player, offensive lineman for the Houston Oilers likes to sing opera, and when audiences hear him sing they’re happy his mind is finally made up . . . you got a problem with that?