It’s a Thursday evening, and Kam Franklin is already onstage, prepping for the show she’ll be doing an hour later at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge, a dive bar and music venue in Midtown Houston.
With Ed “Blacknintendo” Prevost on the keys, she performs two covers—Joy Oladokun’s “If You Got a Problem” and R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”—sounding like a throatier Angie Stone, baseball cap covering the wild, woolly ’fro she’ll reveal later. She recorded those songs for Mad Black Woman, a 2025 EP that was inspired by online harassment she’d received. “Yes, my racist weirdo encounter,” Franklin said after her rehearsal. “I wanted to make something reflective of Black joy. … So, I wanted to revisit what ‘mad’ meant to me. And to me, ‘mad’ meant expressing myself in a way that was fearless and embraced other people’s emotions.”
