Opera Singer Lawrence Brownlee

Brownlee, one of six children, grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, where the region's steel production, had collapsed. Opera was hardly a priority in the crime-ridden city with rusting blast furnaces turned into "just scrap and rubble," in the words of Bruce Springsteen's song "Youngstown."

As a youth, Brownlee had to sing at a church where the choir director was his father, a GM factory worker.

"I hated it," says Brownlee. "I would have ... the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach all week, if I knew I had to sing solo in church the next Sunday."

But he was a child steeped in music, making drums out of oatmeal boxes and even singing in his sleep. "One night, it was 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' at the top of my lungs — and I never woke up!" he says, repeating family lore.

He also joined his high school choir, though he didn't consider a career until his senior year in a program for gifted music students at Youngstown State University. A coach there told him he had an operatic voice.

"I was not convinced, but I decided to give it a try," he says, first as an undergraduate at Indiana's Anderson University, then polishing his voice as an Indiana University graduate student in Bloomington.

Now, he tosses off the nine high C's in "Fille" that first won Pavarotti fame in the 1960s.

But for Brownlee, fame doesn't mean playing the glamorous opera "divo." He prefers, instead, to fly home just outside Atlanta where his wife, Kendra, is expecting their first child.

And on his private Facebook page, "Bio" is followed by four words: "I am just Larry!"