Finnish-american folk/rock songwriter tours Washington

Performing at Naselle Lutheran Church on Friday, Sept. 13 at 7:00 p.m., (freewill donation) is critically acclaimed Jonathan Rundman. The Minneapolis-based folk/rock songwriter has released his first book. Lost Songs of the Suomi Synod is a musical and theological memoir of Rundman’s Lutheran ancestors who emigrated from Finland in the early 1900s. The book collects Rundman’s arrangements and translations of 28 songs from this Nordic immigrant community who settled in Upper Michigan, Minnesota, and in Washington State communities such as the Seattle area and Naselle.

Much of this music has not been sung or heard in North America for a century, and some pieces have never before appeared in the English language.

“This project started out as a studio album. Then it became a music book with some history. But it ended up a history book with some music,” Rundman explains. “Lost Songs of the Suomi Synod is really the aftermath of a mid-life crisis. As I entered my forties, I began to ask all those uncomfortable questions of middle-age: ‘Who am I? How did I become this kind of person? Where is my home? What kind of legacy will I leave to my children?’ I had a spiritual awakening and a musical epiphany.”

Rundman spent ten years researching and collecting the printed music of his Finnish Lutheran heritage. “This particular denomination of Lutherans (the Suomi Synod) merged into a larger church body (the LCA) in 1962, and the only people who still vividly remember the Synod in person are now in their 80s and older. I realized I had better conduct this investigation now while I could still hear first-hand eyewitness accounts of my family’s musical and theological history.” As he traveled coast-to-coast as a touring musician, Rundman visited antique stores, church basements, Lutheran seminaries, and the historical archives at Finlandia University. “When the word got out on Facebook that I was doing this research, Finnish-Americans around the country began to mail me old sheet music, school yearbooks, newspapers, and hymnals.”

Scholars in the fields of ethnomusicology, church history, and Scandinavian studies in Findland and the US have been surprised and enthused by Rundman’s uncovering of these Lost Songs.