Songs of the Finnish Migration presents music, lyrics, and chords for
more than eighty Finnish-language immigrant songs, alongside singable
English translations and detailed notes on Finnish migration history and
music making in the New World. At times boisterous and confident, wry
and irreverent, or impassioned and sorrowful, Finnish immigrant songs
provide a vivid and imaginative portrayal of the momentous process of
migration that forever changed Finnish and Finnish American society.
The current volume expands upon Simo Westerholm's 1983 groundbreaking
collection Reisaavaisen laulu Amerikkaan: Siirtolaislauluja, which
drew from archival sources, manuscripts, sound recordings, and a wide
array of published songbooks to recover the musical culture of the more
than 300,000 Finnish immigrants who traveled to North America to try
their luck in the New World.