“Country Joe” McDonald, a 1960s hippie rock star whose protest song I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag rebuked the Vietnam War and became a highlight of the Woodstock music festival, died Sunday. He was 84 years old.
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, teaching himself folk, blues, and country songs on guitar.
As a musician, he was a long-time presence on the Bay Area scene, where his peers included the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and his former 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 best known for a talking blues track he completed in less than an hour in 1965, the year then-U.S. 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, meaningless death.
At the time he wrote the song, McDonald was co-leader of his newly formed band Country Joe and the Fish, and added a special “FISH” chant before the song: “Give me an F, give me an I, give me an S, give me an H.” When their group appeared at Woodstock in 1969, the Fish were on the verge of breaking up and the chant was replaced by the lyrics “FUCK.”
“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 it brought legal and professional consequences. In 1968, Ed Sullivan canceled a planned appearance by Country Joe and the Fish on his variety show when he learned of the new opening cheer. Shortly after Woodstock, McDonald was arrested and fined for using cheer at a show in Worcester, Massachusetts, an ordeal that 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 as a witness in the trial of the “Chicago Eight” against the organizers of the 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. As he began to perform it, the judge interrupted him and said, “Singing is not allowed in the courtroom.”
McDonald recited the words instead.
McDonald continued to tour and record for decades after Woodstock, but remained defined in 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 mixed feelings about Vietnam. He had served in Japan’s navy in the late 1950s and, in the 1990s, helped organize the construction of a Vietnam veterans memorial in Berkeley.
“Many remembered the horrible fighting that had occurred during the war years in the city,” McDonald later wrote of the ceremony. “However, the atmosphere turned out to be one of reconciliation, not confrontation.”
McDonald was married four times, most recently to Kathy McDonald, and had five children and four grandchildren.
