From NFL Player to Opera Singer: Meet Lawrence "Larry" Harris

When you stand an athletic six-foot-five, weigh 317 pounds, and hail from Texas, professional football would seem like a natural career.

So thought Lawrence Harris, back in 1979, when he happily accepted being drafted from Oklahoma State University to play professionally for the Houston Oilers.

“My uncles were all football players,” he explained. “My cousins played football—and if you could walk and chew gum at the same time, you played football.” But after eight years in the NFL, the former offensive lineman was sidelined with injuries and eventually retired.

It was at age 25, he said, that he had an “epiphany” while working on an oil rig during the off-season, and decided that he would pursue his lifelong passion for music and opera in his next career.

He then began studying and practicing opera in Texas, and has since graced opera stages all over the world with his rich baritone voice and commanding presence.

And when an opportunity came to study and train with the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1990, Harris and his wife Renee Guerrero, an accomplished pianist, decided to move to the East coast. They currently live in Yonkers with their two children.

Harris, a specialist in dramatic roles of Puccini and Verdi operas, who was hailed by The New York Times critic Bernard Holland as a “major voice, said that he is able to actually compare his two careers—with the similarity being the competitiveness and intensity that he said he would bring to both pursuits.

But he added, “Singing opera is more challenging, because it requires the balance between the physical and the emotional, which requires different sets of skills.”

The singer reflected on some of his fondest memories of playing professional football, including his 1981 AFL championship game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, being in training camp with Bubba Smith, his “hero” and “being greeted by a packed astrodome, full of Oiler fans, after our play-off game with Pittsburgh.”   

Now his full-time efforts are focused on getting back to his opera repertoire, since he and his wife have nearly completed work on Romanze, thier CD of 14 songs by Francesco Paolo Tosti, that will be released this year.

Harris and Guerrero will be performing at the , in White Plains this Friday, February 3—in An American Composers Concert.

Guerrero serves on the faculty at the Conservatory and said that performing with her husband and the other featured musicians is part of the adventure that their musical life together has been. “For both of us, it has been about sacrifice, commitment, immersion, great family experiences, going new places and making new friends, she said. 

As for the big Super Bowl contest this Sunday, Guerrero promised that her husband, who she said is naturally the football fan of the house, “has vowed use his most powerful opera voice to root for the New York Giants.”

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