MUSIC
Living with Muddy
Chandra Cooper outside the Muddy Waters home on July 16, 2022, and her mother, Amelia Cooper, with grandfather Muddy at the home in 1964. Both women serve on the board of the nonprofit working to turn the home into the Mojo Museum, and Chandra is its president. CHANDRA BY ANDREW BURKE-STEVENSON FOR CHICAGO READER; AMELIA AND MUDDY BY RAY FLERLAGE COURTESY THE MOJO MUSEUM
You may have heard that Muddy Waters’s Chicago home is becoming a blues museum. Now you can hear from two women in his family who lived there. By DEITRA FARR
40 CHICAGO READER - JULY 21, 2022
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n 1954, McKinley Morganfield bought his first house, located at 4339 S. Lake Park Avenue in Kenwood. Better known as Muddy Waters, the Father of Chicago Blues shared the south-side house with his wife Geneva, Geneva’s son Charles, his granddaughter Amelia “Cookie” Cooper, and his great-granddaughter Chandra “Peaches” Cooper. Quite a few people came and went over the
nearly two decades Muddy lived there. Pianist Otis Spann and harmonica player Paul Oscher, members of Muddy’s band, were among the musicians who stayed in the basement. The basement also hosted legendary jam sessions and rehearsals with some of the greatest blues artists on earth. During his years in Kenwood, Muddy recorded some of his best-known and most enduring songs, including “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Got My Mojo Working,” and
“Mannish Boy.” Today the house is owned by Muddy’s great-granddaughter Chandra, who is the president of the nonprofit that’s working to turn it into the Muddy Waters Mojo Museum. The city designated the house a Chicago landmark last October, and this spring the nonprofit received $250,000 from the Commission on Chicago Landmarks for exterior renovations and another $116,152 from the city
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