“They gave me lessons throughout elementary school and high school,” he says. “I didn’t get a piano until I was about 9 or 10. We didn’t have a piano, so I used to play the table and hear the music in my head.”
Meaning he would tap his fingers on the edge of a table, pretending it was a piano. He still can do this for just about any song. He learned to play easily and kept going in college.
“I think my gifts come from God,” Henderson says.
He started playing piano at restaurants in Pennsylvania and continued that when he came back to Dallas around the late ’90s when his father was ill. This has been his career ever since.
“I’m not going to work any other place, except I taught school for a while,” he says.
This was at southern Dallas’ Southwest Christian Academy for about three years. Henderson taught choral music and directed the children’s choir for students in first through eighth grades.
“They loved me, and I liked them,” Henderson says about his former pupils.
The opportunity at St. Martin’s came along when Henderson found out that the East Dallas mainstay was looking for a new pianist after its former one passed away. He won the gig after auditioning for the role.
“I liked the place, the room,” he says. “They had a grand piano; that made a difference.”
Henderson has been performing at St. Martin’s since around the turn of the century at both the restaurant’s former location and its current one in Old East Dallas. He is one of three pianists (others are Alexis Lugo and Robert Brown) at St. Martin’s and plays Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays.
“I can play what I want to play,” he says about his role. “The people are nice.”
He performs all kinds of music, like pop, religious, classical and tunes from movies and Broadway, but not country.
“It has to have strings,” he says of that genre. But even if he had accompaniment, he still wouldn’t be interested.
St. Martin’s diners will make requests of Henderson on a regular basis, which he’ll generally do if he knows the song.
“If he doesn’t know it, just play it for him on YouTube or something because he plays by hearing,” says Omid Haftlang, one of St. Martin’s operators. “And they’re just so fascinated by that. … They go to YouTube, play it and then he gets it and plays it for them immediately.”
The caveat here is that Henderson also has to want to play the song. The music has to meet the moment, he says. People make plans in advance to have dinner at St. Martin’s, and the tunes are part of what makes the evening special.
Henderson knows he’s appreciated because the same people keep coming back to St. Martin’s to hear him play. He says some diners won’t make a reservation unless they know he’ll be there.
Today, he also plays and directs the choir at Lee Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in southern Dallas on three Sundays each month. He continues this work because it’s his act of service.
“We were raised to help people,” Henderson says.