This article is about the song. For the band, see Loituma. For the animation, see Loituma Girl.
"Ievan polkka" (Finnish for "Ieva's Polka") is a Finnish song with lyrics printed in 1928[1] and written by Eino Kettunen to a traditional Finnish polka tune. The song is sung in an Eastern Savonian dialect spoken in North Karelia. It is sung from the point of view of a young man, about a woman called Ieva (dialectal for the name Eva or Eeva in standard Finnish) who sneaks out and dances the polka with him all night. The song is often mistaken for a traditional folk song, but the lyrics by Eino Kettunen are still under copyright. Later, a scat singing version of the song by the band Loituma was incorporated into the viral animation Loituma Girl. In 2007, the song was brought into worldwide popular culture through a cover sung by Hatsune Miku, with Otomania arranging the music and providing Miku's voice manipulation.
Origin
In South Karelia, "Ievan polkka" is also known as "Savitaipaleen polkka", due to its similarity to a tune of that name. Polka was introduced into Northern Europe during the late 19th century, which implies that the tune, as it is known today, originates from this era.[2]
Owing to its viral exposure in popular culture, "Ievan polkka" has become one of the most famous Finnish songs in the world.
Very popular after World War II, the song was almost forgotten during the late 1970s and 1980s. The song resurfaced after an a cappella performance by the Finnish quartet Loituma on the Yle TV2 show Soi soitto soi in 1996, whose song was first released on their debut album, Loituma, in 1995. The Loituma lyrics and arrangement are under copyright and published by Warner Chappell Music outside the Nordic countries. The album was released in the United States as Things of Beauty in 1998.
The Loituma version of the song acquired great international popularity as part of an Internet phenomenon in the spring of 2006, when the Loituma Girl (also known as Leekspin), a looped animation of anime character Orihime Inoue from the Bleach series twirling either a spring onion (in the Japanese original) or a leek (in the English dub), set to a scat singing section of the song, was posted on Russian LiveJournal. For the animation, only the second half of the fifth stanza (four lines) and the complete sixth stanza (eight lines) are used. It quickly became a global hit and the song soon enjoyed overwhelming popularity as a ringtone.[3][user-generated source] Since then, the song has been circulating under several misspelled variations of its original name, including "Ievas polkka", "Levan polkka" (due to the similarity between the sans-serif lowercase L (l) and uppercase i (I)) and "Leekspin Song".
Fans of the Vocaloid software have made Vocaloid voicebanks, such as Megurine Luka, Kagamine Rin, and Kagamine Len cover the song. The most popular Vocaloid cover belonged to Japanese artist Otomania, who in 2007 made Hatsune Miku sing it with the nonsensical lyrics by Loituma. The official music video has garnered close to 6.5 million views on Niconico by May 2024.[4] It features a chibi derivative of Hatsune Miku, officially known as Hatchune Miku, holding a spring onion in reference to Loituma Girl, and is the origin of her association with spring onions or leeks. Its popularity resulted in its use by the Vocaloid rhythm game series Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA, mainly as tutorial music. It has also been used in a commercial promoting the LGG5 smartphone.[5]
