Limmie Pulliam, a powerful tenor who quit singing in his early 20s when opera companies objected to his size, but then, after 12 years working as a debt collector and security guard, revived his career to considerable acclaim, died on May 19 in Houston. He was 50.
Mr. Pulliam’s death, while visiting family, was announced by his management company, Fletcher Artist Management, which did not specify a cause. He had been living in Kennett, Mo., his hometown.
Winning the enthusiastic backing of conductors, critics and audiences with his heroic voice, Mr. Pulliam overcame the humiliation and rejection that drove him to nearly scuttle his own career.
“I became quite resentful, so I walked away,” he said in a 2024 podcast interview with Carmen Twillie Ambar, the president of Oberlin College, his alma mater.
When he returned to the stage, his hefty, dramatic sound allowed him to succeed in strenuous roles like Verdi’s Otello and Radamès (in “Aida”), soaring above even dense orchestras. He died two days after singing Mahler’s mighty Eighth Symphony with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Pulliam was initially mistaken for a baritone, and he sang with baritonal richness and depth, to complement his bronzed high notes.
“He has an amazing voice,” Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director, told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2022, when Mr. Pulliam sang “Otello” with the orchestra. “I’ve not heard a better Otello in a very long time. He really is quite something.”
The New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe wrote, of that performance, that once Mr. Pulliam “got past some dropped high notes in ‘Ora e per sempre,’ he sang with burnished security, and acted — even in this semi-staged setting — with moving sobriety.”
Limmie Demetrus Pulliam was born on Jan. 10, 1976, in Kennett, the youngest of 10 children of Limmie D. Pulliam Sr., a preacher, and Virgie Mae Pulliam.
He grew up excelling at baseball, football and field sports, and singing in church. In middle school one day, his imitation of Stevie Wonder caught the attention of the choir director, who introduced him to opera. When a judge at a high school choir competition urged him to continue his studies at Oberlin and its prestigious music conservatory, he applied and got in, graduating in 1998.
But just as his professional career was beginning, he faced headwinds because of his size.
“I would get little messages or emails from general directors,” he said in the 2024 podcast interview. “A couple of them once said, ‘You have probably one of the most moving voices I’ve heard in probably the last decade, but call me after you’ve lost 50 pounds, and then I’ll give you a live audition.’”
He added: “Even as a person of size, I experience the same emotions that someone who’s 150 pounds experiences. I love, I hurt, I feel joy, I feel pain.”
He decided the embarrassment wasn’t worth it and stopped singing, even for his own pleasure.
“I was deliberately making the decision not to sing,” he told The Times in 2023. “I just didn’t have the desire.”
He met his father’s pleas to sing at church with the same resistance. “You couldn’t pay me to stand in front of an audience to sing,” he said in the podcast interview.
But in 2007, when Mr. Pulliam was working as an organizer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in southern Missouri, a singer who had been brought in to perform the national anthem pulled out at the last minute.
Knowing that Mr. Pulliam had studied opera, his colleagues encouraged him to step up. Terrified, he forced himself onto the stage.
“I came out and sang the anthem in the lowest key I could,” he said in a 2023 interview with the writer Fred Plotkin.
Then he performed at some more events. “I noticed some very interesting changes in my voice,” he told The Times. “It had taken on a more mature, burnished quality. And it had grown substantially in size.”
So he got to work: polishing, refining, practicing. “I began dallying around with arias that I enjoyed,” he told Mr. Plotkin. “I kept working, working, working.”
In 2012, at 36, he entered the vocal competition at the National Opera Association’s annual conference, and won.
“That kicked me back on the path,” he told Mr. Plotkin.
He went on to appear at Carnegie Hall; with companies including the Los Angeles Opera; and with major ensembles like the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Germany. In December 2022, he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, becoming the first Black singer to appear as Radamès there.
Mr. Pulliam is survived by his mother; his sisters Mary Pulliam, Tressa Pulliam-Grogan, Evelyn Pulliam and Sharon Pulliam; and his brothers Clarence, Lavan, Sam and Michael.
In the 2023 interview with The Times, Mr. Pulliam recalled his work with a new voice teacher as he prepared to make his return.
“We realized that we had something that was special — that there wasn’t anyone like me as an artist out there,” he said. “We were working to rekindle the voice. That’s when I found the joy again in singing.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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