Jeannine M. Baker kept her family safe, fed and rocking.
Her late husband was Chicago bluesman Lonnie Brooks. Her sons, Ronnie Baker Brooks and Wayne Baker Brooks, are also blues musicians.
“She was the glue. She held it down when my dad was on the road. She was sweet, but tough, and pushed all of us to be better,” Ronnie Baker Brooks said.
“The life of a musician, it’s tough, but we always had love in the house. Maybe not food or other necessities early on in my dad’s career when we were very young, but there was love, and my mom and dad created that,” he said.
Ms. Baker died Sept. 23 from a variety of health issues. She was 82.
Ronnie Baker Brooks recalled that before he got serious about music and joined his dad on the road, he had a temp job as a mail clerk and got paid in cash under the table.
The arrangement didn’t fly with his mother, who served as a regional manager for the Internal Revenue Service.
“She was like ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You gotta get a check and pay your Social Security and do it the right way. She didn’t want nobody in my family to have tax problems,” her son said.
Her husband and sons played together for years, and Ms. Baker put her foot down, literally, when it came to all-day-and-into-the-night music sessions in the family’s basement.
“Sometimes we wouldn’t eat, and she’d stomp on the floor and shout ‘Come up here and eat y’all! It’s getting late!” he said.
“Of course, dad gets the glory, but my mom was the backbone,” said Ronnie Baker Brooks, adding that his mother kept the family’s books and helped him and his late sister, Jackie Graham, start a recording company.
Before moving to the Beverly and Morgan Park area, Ms. Baker raised her family across the street from Washington Park.
“Mom kept us in the house and out of trouble because it started getting bad in that area. We’d play board games and cards, and then, I never forget, my dad would say ‘I know there’s gangs out there, but y’all going to be in my gang,’” Ronnie Baker Brooks said.
Born in Chicago in February 1941, Ms. Baker grew up in Hyde Park.
She and a friend went to a blues club on the South Side in 1959 where her future husband approached her and asked if he could buy her a Coca-Cola.
They married at City Hall in 1974 and were together for more than 50 years before they divorced, only to become best friends again.
“They realized ‘I need my husband’ and ‘I need my wife,’ Ronnie Baker Brooks said.
Ms. Baker, who earned a degree later in life from the University of Phoenix, worked at the IRS for more than two decades, family said.
“When we were little, she cleaned houses and hospitals to help support the family,” her son said. “I leaned on her for strength many times.”
Her daughter, Denise Baker, said that while she was still in beauty school, her mother mysteriously asked her to meet at an address on Western Avenue.
“We walked up to a closed business, and my mom said, ‘This is your new salon.’ My mom and dad bought a beauty salon for me and my sister Gina as a surprise,” said Denise Baker.
Both sisters now do hair and makeup for film productions.
“She lifted us, encouraged us, and I adored that about her,” she said.
Ronnie Baker Brooks learned of his mother’s death shortly before he was to take the stage at a show in Kansas City, Missouri.
“There was nothing I could do. I went on and didn’t say anything. I just did the show and let my emotions out through my music,” he said.
“My mom wasn’t a musician but was musically inclined. She’d always listened to my music and knew when it was good and when it was bad. She was my tester, and she’d say ‘Oh, I like that one.’ Or ‘You’re going to need to work on that one.’”
In addition to her sons, Wayne Baker Brooks and Ronnie Baker Brooks, and her daughters, Gina Baker Landers and Denise Baker, Ms. Baker is also survived by her sons Robert Lauderdale and Russell Baker.
Services have been held.
