“Country Joe” McDonald, who fronted the band Country Joe and the Fish and became an emblem of the 1960s antiwar counterculture through a prominent appearance at the Woodstock festival, died Saturday at age 84.
The singer, born Joseph Allen McDonald, died of Parkinson’s in Berkeley, according to a statement on the group’s social media and reported sources close to his wife.
McDonald’s best known song was “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” a Vietnam protest song he performed at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The performance included the infamous call-and-response “Fish Cheer,” which had the audience spelling out the F-word at McDonald’s behest.
Born on January 1, 1942, in Washington, D.C., McDonald grew up in El Monte, California, where he played trombone with dance bands on the weekends. He joined the Navy as a teenager — serving from 1959 to 1962 — before returning to L.A. to attend state college. He moved to the Bay area in 1965, where he co-founded Country Joe and the Fish with guitarist Barry Melton in Berkeley.
“It was suggested that the group be called Country Mao and the Fish because Mao Tse-tung said that the revolutionaries move like fish through the sea, and I said that was stupid,” he told the website Classic Bands. “It was suggested that we call it Country Joe and the Fish after Joseph Stalin.” Although, of course, he was the true “Joe” of the group’s moniker, the connection was not a big stretch: his communist parents had named him after Stalin.
The band released its debut album, “Electric Music for the Mind and Body,” in 1967. It did not include “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” or “The Fish Cheer,” apparently due to fears of censorship, although it did include protest songs like “Superbird,” which satirized President Lyndon Johnson. The more controversial material made it onto their second album.
Of his famous protest song, McDonald told the Street Spirit website, “The important thing about the ‘Fixin’ to Die Rag’ was that it had a new point of view that did not blame soldiers for war. It just blamed the politicians and it blamed the manufacturers of weapons. It didn’t blame the soldiers. Someone who was in the military could sing the song, and the attitude is, ‘Whoopee, we’re all going to die.’ Most peace songs of the era blamed the soldiers for the war.”
Some of the Woodstock audience was already primed to join in on chanting “The Fish Cheer,” which had picked up notoriety after McDonald was charged with inciting lewd behavior for its appearance in a Massachusetts performance.
McDonald explained the group’s origins: “I moved to Berkeley in the summer of 1965, after the Free Speech Movement. So I came up here from southern California and got miraculously tapped into the folk music thing that was happening here at that time. I met Barry Melton at the University of California folk festival, and we hit it off. I started playing a few of my songs, and he played lead guitar. We were a duo. Then I met some other people, and Ed Denson, Mike Beardslee and I started putting out a little magazine called Rag Baby… a biweekly that had music articles and schedules of things that were happening around town, music and dancing and events. It was mostly focused on folk music and the folk scene.”
Of “Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” he said, “The only reason I could write those lyrics was having grown up in a socialist family. My parents were members of the Communist Party when I was born, but later became disenchanted with them. And then they became part of the Progressive Party and the left socialist parties that were around. I read the leftist newspapers and I was familiar with the basic tenets of socialism about the industrial complex that generates war. So I was able to write lyrics about the warmakers that profit from war, and I was able to write a lyric from the point of view of the soldier because I had been in the military.”
Additionally, he said, “I felt disenchanted from my parents, in a way. As far as politics, we didn’t have a very good relationship, so it was easy for me to say: ‘Come on mothers throughout the land, pack your boys off to Vietnam.’ And that sarcasm was a really nice thing, and GIs love sarcasm.”
McDonald continued to write songs addressing environmental issues and civil rights, releasing dozens of solo records after Country Joe and the Fish disbanded in 1971.
Fifty years after writing his signature song in 1965, he sang it at an anti-nuclear protest at Livermore Laboratory on the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
In a 2016 interview, he said, “I find the concept of 50 years incomprehensible. But it’s indisputable because I have children and some of those children have children and I know that the math is right. And I just finished an album and the title of it is ’50’ because it’s 50 years since the first album. It’s called ‘Goodbye Blues.’ I didn’t die, so there you are. I’m still alive and I’m still doing something. Filling a need helps a lot, and it keeps me sane.”
He continued, “I grew up in a family of radical socialists, and quite honestly, I really get bored with the theory and speechifying of various movements and philosophies from the left. It doesn’t mean I don’t support them. But as an entertainer, I know that you can lose your audience. I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and I consider myself a morale-booster for these causes. I don’t do it if I don’t support the cause and the ideas and the people that are doing it. It’s really quite remarkable what people are doing in many movements. I like to support these movements, because they are sometimes not mainstream and no one else is supporting them, and so I feel an obligation to do it. As an activist, I like to give a voice and to support people and movements that don’t have mainstream support and visibility. And I realize that my name has a certain notoriety and that my presence can be a morale-booster.”
Although complete information on his family was not immediately available, McDonald said in interviews that he had five children, and is known to be survived by his wife, Kathy.
