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“Country Joe” McDonald, a hippy rock star of the 1960s whose protest track I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag rebuked the Vietnam war and became a highlight of the Woodstock music festival, died on Sunday. He was 84.
McDonald died in Berkeley, California. His death from complications of Parkinson’s disease was reported by Kathy McDonald, his wife of 43 years, in a statement issued by his publicist.
Born in 1942 in Washington DC and raised in El Monte, California, McDonald began writing songs as a teenager, when he taught himself folk, blues and country songs on guitar.
As a musician, he was a longtime presence in the Bay Area scene, where peers included the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and his one-time girlfriend, Janis Joplin. He wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs, from psychedelic jams to soul-influenced rockers, and released dozens of albums.
But he was known best for a talking blues track he completed in less than an hour in 1965 – the year the then US president, Lyndon Johnson, began sending ground forces to Vietnam.
In the deadpan style of McDonald’s hero, Woody Guthrie, I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag was a mock celebration of war and early, senseless death.
At the time he wrote the song, McDonald was co-leader of his newly formed band Country Joe and the Fish, and he added a special “F-I-S-H” chant before the song: “Give me an F, give me an I, give me an S, give me an H.” By the time his group appeared at Woodstock in 1969, the Fish were on the verge of breaking up, and the chant was replaced by the letters “F-U-C-K”.
“Some people alluded to peace and stuff [at Woodstock], but I was talking about Vietnam,” McDonald told the Associated Press in 2019. He called the opening chant “an expression of our anger and frustration over the Vietnam war, which was killing us, literally killing us”.
The song helped make him famous, but brought legal and professional consequences. In 1968, Ed Sullivan cancelled a planned appearance by Country Joe and the Fish on his variety show when he learned of the new opening cheer. Soon after Woodstock, McDonald was arrested and fined for using the cheer at a show in Worcester, Massachusetts, an ordeal which helped hasten the band’s demise.
McDonald even performed the song in court. His friendships with political radicals such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin led to his being called in as a witness in the “Chicago Eight (or Seven)” trial against organisers of anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago.
On the stand, he explained how he had met with Hoffman and others and told them about I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag. When he began performing it, the judge interrupted and told him, “No singing is permitted in the courtroom.”
McDonald recited the words instead.
McDonald continued touring and recording for decades after Woodstock, but remained defined by the late 60s. His albums included Country, Carry On, Time Flies By and 50, and he would continue writing protest songs, notably the 1982 release Save the Whales.
Although defined by his anti-war activism, McDonald acknowledged conflicted feelings about Vietnam. He had served in the navy in Japan in the late 1950s, and in the 90s, he helped organise the construction of a Vietnam veterans memorial in Berkeley.
“Many remembered the ugly confrontations that had happened during the war years in the city,” McDonald later wrote of the ceremony. “Yet the atmosphere proved to be one of reconciliation, not confrontation.”
McDonald was married four times, most recently to Kathy McDonald, and had five children and four grandchildren.
