Country Joe McDonald, the American musician best known for his Vietnam War protest song 'I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag' and his iconic performance at the 1969 Woodstock festival, has died at the age of 84. His wife of 43 years, Kathy McDonald, confirmed that he died on Sunday in Berkeley, California, from complications of Parkinson's disease.
Born in Washington DC in 1942 and raised in El Monte, California, McDonald taught himself folk, blues and country guitar as a teenager. He became a fixture of the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, alongside acts such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin, with whom he once had a relationship. Over his career, he wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs and released dozens of albums.
McDonald's most famous work, 'I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag', was a talking blues song completed in under an hour in 1965, the year President Lyndon Johnson sent ground forces to Vietnam. Written in the deadpan style of his hero Woody Guthrie, the song was a mock celebration of war. McDonald added a chant before the song: at Woodstock, the band's original 'F-I-S-H' chant was replaced with 'F-U-C-K', which McDonald later described as 'an expression of our anger and frustration over the Vietnam war'.
The song brought fame but also legal trouble. In 1968, Ed Sullivan cancelled a planned appearance after learning of the new chant. After Woodstock, McDonald was arrested and fined for using the cheer at a show in Massachusetts, an event that hastened the breakup of his band, Country Joe and the Fish. He even performed the song in court during the 'Chicago Eight' trial, where he was called as a witness, but the judge stopped him, saying 'No singing is permitted in the courtroom.'
McDonald continued touring and recording for decades, releasing albums such as 'Country', 'Carry On', 'Time Flies By' and '50', and writing protest songs including 1982's 'Save the Whales'. Despite his anti-war activism, he had conflicted feelings about Vietnam, having served in the US Navy in Japan in the late 1950s. In the 1990s, he helped organise the construction of a Vietnam veterans memorial in Berkeley, describing the ceremony as 'one of reconciliation, not confrontation'.
McDonald was married four times and had five children and four grandchildren.
