Long utilized by Northeastern Woodlands tribes as a food ingredient (especially for on-the-go pemmican), as well as a dye and a wound medicine, they called the red berries “sassamanash” and showed the famished Plymouth Pilgrims how best to eat them.  Noting how the acidic fruit’s evergreen plant resembled the neck, head and bill of a crane when it was in bloom, the English settlers referred to the shrub as a “craneberry” bush. Within a generation or two it was “cranberry”.

Henry Hall, a Revolutionary War veteran living in Dennis, Massachusetts is believed to have been the first to actually farm the berries, which were soon being shipped to Europe.  By the 1820s cranberry bushes were being planted in Russia and the Nordic countries, while in North America they were eventually grown as far west as British Columbia and Washington State.

While Massachusetts remains the second largest producer of the antioxidant-rich “superfruit”, more than half of all cranberries harvested in America now come from Wisconsin.  However, due to their bitter/sour/sharp flavor only five percent of these are actually purchased fresh. As a matter of fact the leading cranberry product today is cranberry juice cocktail, which (though pleasingly tart) contains a tablespoon of sugar per ounce.

So perhaps it was a glucose spike that led Mike and Noel Hogan, a couple of brothers in Limerick, Ireland, (home of that kind of verse that …”packs laughs anatomical…in a space that is quite economical”) to name their newly formed band, The Cranberry Saw Us (a pun, as in “cranberry sauce”) in 1989.  After losing their lead singer a year or so later they advertised for a new one and auditioned Dolores O’Riordan, who had taken one of the band’s demos and arrived at the session with re-written lyrics and a new melody.

She was hired on the spot and asked to re-craft another demo. Eventually the resulting songs, “Linger” and today’s selection, would turn out to be the (sensibly renamed) Cranberries biggest hits after being featured on the group’s debut album, “Everybody Else is Doing it, So Why Can’t We?”

Unlike this week’s Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday’s selections, each entitled “Dream,” you will be pleased to know that we have finally progressed, and today’s selection is entitled “Dreams”.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Thursday 28 June 

Dreams

 Oh, my life is changing everyday

In every possible way

And my dreams it’s never quiet as it seems

Never quiet as it seems

 I know I’ve felt like this before

But now I’m feeling it even more

Because it came from you

And then I open up and see

The person falling here is me

A different way to be

 I want more, impossible to ignore

Impossible to ignore

And they’ll come true, impossible not to do

Impossible not to do

 And now I tell you openly

You have my heart so don’t hurt me

You’re what I couldn’t find

A totally amazing mind

So understanding and so kind

You’re everything to me

 Oh, my life is changing every day

In every possible way

And my dreams it’s never quiet as it seems

‘Cause you’re a dream to me, dream to me