Songs of the Finnish Migration: Amplification and Revitalization

On an unseasonably warm October day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the midst of a global pandemic, Ralph and Jaana Tuttila’s ensemble Laulu Aika met in a backyard to perform six songs to be recorded by the documentary filmmaker Cris Anderson. Masked and physically distanced, Laulu Aika, Finnish for “song time,” performed these Finnish and Finnish American folk songs from the bilingual anthology Songs of the Finnish Migration, a work edited by the authors of this chapter, Thomas A. DuBois and B. Marcus Cederström (hereafter referred to as Tom and Marcus). The recorded performance was part of a larger project centered