Cranberries – "Zombie" (1994)

With their tanks and their bombs

And their bombs and their guns

Massachusetts ranks second among all states when it comes to cranberry production, and many of those cranberries are grown on Cape Cod.

Floating cranberries

Captain Henry Hall became the first man to successfully cultivate cranberries on Cape Cod some 200 years ago.  I’ve been visiting the Cape for over 40 years, but I didn’t know until today that the house where I stay is literally only a stone’s throw from Hall’s original cranberry bog.  (The land that house was built on was once owned by Hall.)

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Until this year, I had never been on the Cape after Labor Day – which meant that I had never been around for the cranberry harvest before.

The Cape Cod Rail Trail passes by a number of cranberry bogs, and I interrupted a couple of my daily bike rides to check out the harvest.

A cranberry “eggbeater”

I learned that most of the cranberries that go into cranberry sauce or cranberry juice are gathered through a process known as “wet harvesting.”

When the berries are ripe, the farmer floods the bog.  He then drives a machine called an “eggbeater” through the bog, agitating the water so that the berries break free from the vines and float on top of the water.  (Cranberries float because have an internal air pocket.)

Lassoed cranberries

The berries are then essentially lassoed and sucked up through big-ass hoses into trucks, which transport them to processing plants:

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The Cranberries, who formed in Limerick, Ireland in 1989, broke up after the death of their lead singer and chief songwriter, Dolores Mary Eileen O’Riordan, in 2018.  (O’Riordan drowned in the bathtub of a London hotel room after drinking herself unconscious.)

O’Riordan’s voice was utterly unique –  when you hear one of her tracks, you know for sure that it’s her singing.

Dolores O'Riordan

O’Riordan wrote “Zombie” – the band’s best-known song – in memory of two young boys who were killed when two bombs hidden by the Irish Republican Army exploded in Warrington, England on March 20, 1993. 

Click here to watch the official music video for “Zombie,” which has been viewed over one billion times on YouTube.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: