Posted on 03/09/2026 7:30:58 PM PDT by nickcarraway
“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.
The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard “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.”
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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.
The song Fixin’ To die on the first Bob Dylan album was written and recorded by Delta blues musician Bukka White in 1940. White was influential and revered by younger blues artists including Tom Rush whose honor of Bukka White in the long Panama Limited brought some deserved name recognition to the older man. The complicated fingering and tones on White’s Panama Limited is reminiscent of Robert Johnson’s. Sounds like two or even three guitars with the chiming bell tone, the wheels rushing and so on.
They are? Somebody forgot to tell a lot of old men with gray man buns and women in faded tie dyed tops and baggy pants and worn out sandals. Watch for them in any woke protests.
Even though they have a similar name, the songs are not related.
God, ive always hated that era..the music, the clothes..ALL OF IT.
Vivi story. Case of a music critic’s veto.
This passage sent chills through many of draft age in those days:
“Come on mothers throughout the land, / Pack your boys off to Vietnam. / Come on fathers, don’t hesitate, / Send ‘em off before it’s too late. / Be the first one on your block / To have your boy come home in a box”.
I wasn’t one of them. Tried to enlist and failed the physical. My MD said not to bother trying again. He was a Marine vet. “With your heart you’d be dead during basic training.” Somehow, with God’s help, I healed and the rheumatic fever valve damage healed slowly on its own.
We had a guy in our dorm in ‘70 at Maryland.
He was a Viet Nam vet and joined the national guard when he got out.
They called out the nat guard for the spring riots and he ended up living
in a tent in Greenbeit Park and guarding the computer center across the street
from our dorm.
Strange days indeed
Gimme and Eff
Give me an F!
Give me a I!
Give me an S!
Give me an H!
What's that spell?
Fish!
What's that spell?
Fish!
What's that spell?
Fish!
Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
He's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books, pick up a gun
Gonna have a whole lot of fun
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Ah, ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We're all gonna die
Well come on generals let's move fast
Your big chance has come at last
Gotta go out, get those reds
The only good commie is the one that's dead
And you know that peace could only be won
When we've blown them all to kingdom come
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We're all gonna die
Well come on Wall Street don't move slow
Why man, this is war-a-go-go
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of the trade
Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb
They drop it on the Viet Cong
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We're all gona die
Well come on mothers throughout the land
Pack your boys off to Vietnam
Come on fathers don't hesitate
Send them off before it's too late
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We're all gonna die
I know. Was just clarifying for the person who mentioned the first Columbia album for Bob Dylan.
A critic noted that he worked to make a grainy, scratchy, old man’s sound for that song. Then in his age of his 60s to 70s he really sounded that way.
Saw him around 1971. We all waited for the F-cheer. Saying that word back then was serious rebellion when a teenager.
I remember he had a female drummer,clear drum set.
Another one from the war.
Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues by Tom Paxton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8b9q3ihyCw
Saw him/them at Woodstock . I’d just turned 17 and hitched rides from eastern CT with a buddy . Told my parents we had a ride to and back . Lied . Vividly remember The Who’s performance , but don’t remember Country Joe & The Fish at all . Too be honest , if The Who hadn’t played Woodstock I probably wouldn’t have gone . I liked CCR, Ten Years After , and a couple of other groups but wouldn’t have gone all that way to see them .
1969-I graduated from a military high school (Georgia Military College).
1970-I was in college; (National Guard in Ohio killed 4 students).
1970-I joined the National Guard (no interest in going to Vietnam).
I trained with a guy from Wooster, Ohio, who was joining the guard unit that were assigned to Kent State.
-
So there I was ...
a person that did not want to go to Vietnam;
and a college student (remember Dan Quayle?)
Well at least he blamed LBJ for the war, and not Nixon, like all the other lefties do, as if LBJ never existed.
GIVE ME AN F!!!!
Bell-bottom Hell.
That would have been an anachronism, as Nixon wasn't even president yet. Their peak was while LBJ was president, and they broke up a little more than a year after Nixon was president.
It looks like none of their songs even charted on the Top 100, but their albums got as high as #23.
Country Joe was a despicable man but managed to capture the war in the perspective of the soldier on the ground with an M-16 in his hands. Those kids were sent over there and were the most formidable force but were not allowed to fight in the manner of which to win as were our Air Force and Naval Air forces also restrained. This is on LBJ and Robert McNamara. Oddly LBJ was a patriot and corrupt but had advisors that were not patriots. He listened to them and thus made many bad decisions.
Why are some of my friends dead from the sixties in a war we could have won quickly and easily if we truly went to war. We did not go to true devastating annihilation war. My friends died and we lost.
His album War War War were songs that utilized the poems of Robert W. Service.
They are very well done.
I recommend “ The Man from Athabasca “
Was a floppy fish, mud puddle to mud puddle, NKP 67, along the Mekong...
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