Music has the ability to lift your spirits; sure, we know that.  But research suggests that it also has the ability to lower your blood pressure.  A research study conducted at the University of Florence, Italy showed that just 30 minutes a day of classical, Celtic, or Indian music decreased participants’ blood pressure.  (Note the absence of rock as a palliative.)

Another study, this one at The U of Maryland Medical Center, discovered that when patients listened to their favorite music, their blood vessel diameter and blood flow increased.  Bring on the lovable dogs, and you’ll have a blood pressure reading the envy of an athlete at his or her peak.

Yet another, done at the Osaka University Grad School of Medicine, had participants listening bimonthly to their favorite pop, jazz, or classical.  Researchers found that participants (apparently permanently) lowered their blood pressure on average 5 to 6 points after just three months.  Without the adjuvant meds universally understood to be imperative to lower BP.

Take that, Affordable Care Act!

Okay, so all that being the case, going to this 21/4-hour feast of folk songs and beloved country melodies from a century ago up to about a decade ago will lower your BP a chunk for a week or so.  You fear it’ll be maybe a tad boring, as so many folk tunes have the theme of lonesome someone-or-others wandering through the back country, bemoaning their dead dogs killed by the choo-choo or the last sweetheart that absquatulated, taking their moms’ lockets.

But from the moment these impressively talented nine singers, musicians, and performers greet the audience from the descending  stairs, before they actually go on, there is a charm that eludes 95% of musicals that try so much harder.

Old standards from Pete Seeger; Peter, Paul and Mary; Arlo Guthrie’s dad, Lead Belly, all the way back to the first decade of the 20^th century, are strung together with amusing, creative, and beatific patter, screens with grainy footage, and a change of coveralls.

Female singers have transcendently lovely voices on their solos, but ensemble pieces are just terrific, too.  Spirituals find their way in, as well as union songs and working men’s themes.  A few of the fun songs are new to us (“Halleluyah ~ I’m a Bum!”), and a few – “Tzena, Tzena” – are in other languages.  The men are as genial and cheerfully engaging as the women, and the costumer makes subtle clothing or prop changes, glasses or hairdo, that alter the era in a trice.

And though you think it’ll be, maybe, hokey, you’re invited to sing along on quite a few, knitting the audience into a unified posse that enjoys the whole evening as if a family at a hootenanny after a particularly great Thanksgiving meal.

Besides, you get to sing out loud with a bunch of other off-key audiencers.  No embarrassment, no stress.  No fear of not making The Voice's audition cut.

Go.  It’ll actually do your heart good.  Lose a few of those BP points.