Guitarist John Greenfield started his latest band, Illinois First!, after picking up a 1986 grade school textbook called Discovering Illinois at a yard sale last fall. The lyrics for “Nauvoo (City of Joseph)” are culled from what he found inside: “Our town of 15,000 was bigger than Chicago / Made of bricks and mortar, plaster and paint / But the gentiles hated and / Feared us / And threatened our very lives / They accused us of polygamy– / Having multiple wives.”
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Greenfield, a Pennsylvania native and occasional Reader contributor, currently works as the bike parking coordinator for the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. On a bike trip along the Mississippi last summer, he stopped in Nauvoo, which was settled in 1839 by Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith and his followers after they were thrown out of Missouri. He was taken with the town’s history: five years after their arrival, Smith and his brother were arrested for destroying an anti-Mormon printing press and killed by an angry mob. The town made news earlier this year when the Illinois legislature issued a formal apology for banishing Mormons from the state in 1846. “It’s an amazing place,” Greenfield says.
“We’re an edutainment kind of act,” says accordion player Rob Cruz, a Des Plaines native. “John views the state with a childlike wonder and curiosity that a native-born Illlinoisan would find hard to muster.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/T.C. O’Rourke.
