Toni Tikkanen died at home near Calumet on September 20, 2004, after eight years of breast cancer.

Toni combined her love of music and dance with her speech therapy, using her banjo and singing to teach speech and language skills.

Toni's passions throughout her life were music and dancing. She was an accomplished folk musician playing the guitar, banjo, accordion and piano and also singing in English, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Yiddish and several Balkan languages. She played in the Thimbleberry Band, the Thimbleberry Hi-Liters, Will Kilpela and Friends and the Finn Hall Band. She appeared frequently throughout the Upper Peninsula, Wisconsin and Minnesota and recorded as a vocalist with the Finn Hall Band.

Toni performed in l982, l992 and 1997 at the Kaustinen Folk Festival in Finland and was a musician with the Kisarit Finnish Folk dance tour to Finland in 1988. With her husband, she was the co-founder of the Finnish-American Folk Music Festival, which sponsored annual concerts for fifteen years at the Calumet Theatre, and of Thimbleberry Recordings, which won two awards from the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. Toni and her husband were also given honors by the Michigan Folklife Program at the Michigan State University Museum in 2001 for their contributions to the preservation of traditional music in the Upper Peninsula.

A graceful and skilled folk dancer, Toni was the founder and teacher for the Northern Lights Folk Dance group in Crystal Falls and for the performing folk dance group known as Kantodancistaro. She was a long-time member of the Copper Country Folk Dance Club.


The remains have been cremated, the family requests that contributions in Toni's name be made to the Omega House residential hospice program, 920 Water St., Hancock, MI 49930.