# The Teacher Upstairs at Mr. Henry’s
Before Roberta Flack’s voice floated out of radios across America, it traveled a shorter route: up a staircase above a Capitol Hill restaurant, past dinner plates, drinks, and the ordinary noise of a Washington night.
Flack was a Howard University graduate, a D.C. public schoolteacher, and, after the school day was done, a musician with a piano and a place to play. That place was Mr. Henry’s, Henry Yaffe’s neighborhood restaurant at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, opened in 1966.
By 1968, Yaffe had given her a regular upstairs spot. Downstairs, Mr. Henry’s fed people, poured drinks, and made room for conversation. Upstairs, Flack played piano and sang after spending her days teaching in D.C. public schools.
There’s a gentle comedy in the split life of it. By day, she was the teacher. By night, she was the reason grown-ups hushed one another. Anyone who came upstairs expecting background music had to learn, quickly, that forks could wait.
No spotlight from far away had found her yet. No national audience was leaning in. Just a room above a restaurant, a proprietor willing to make space, and a young musician being heard by whoever climbed the stairs.
Then jazz musician Les McCann came to Mr. Henry’s.
McCann didn’t hear background music. He heard Roberta Flack. Her voice and piano playing struck him deeply enough that he did more than praise her on the way out. He helped her get an audition with Atlantic Records.
That was the turn: not a lightning bolt, exactly, but a door opening because someone had been listening closely. Flack had already been doing the work, night after night, in the upstairs room. Yaffe had already made the space for it. McCann’s arrival connected that small Washington room to something much wider.
Her debut album, “First Take,” came out in 1969. A few years later, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1972.
Those facts are big, polished, and easy to print. But the tender part is smaller. Before the famous record, before the award, before the song became part of so many people’s lives, there was a teacher walking into Mr. Henry’s after work and going upstairs to play.
And there was Henry Yaffe, whose restaurant had room for more than dinner.
That’s a lovely thing for a staircase to carry.