The nuclear shell model is used to study ordinary muon capture of light nuclei in the p, sd and p-sd shell-model spaces. Several well-established two-body interactions are applied to calculate the involved nuclear matrix elements and the emerging results are compared with each other. The resulting theoretical partial muon-capture rates are compared with experimental data and their stability against different model spaces and interactions studied, The effects of the induced-pseudoscalar strength, Cp, On the capture rates is discussed, The relation between the allowed partial muon capture rates and the Gamow-Teller strength function is stressed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.