Joseph Allen "Country Joe" McDonald (January 1, 1942 – March 7, 2026) was an American singer, songwriter, musician and film composer, who was the lead singer and co-founder of the 1960s psychedelic folk-rock group Country Joe and the Fish. He wrote some of the group's most well-known songs, including "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine" and "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag", the latter a protest song against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
After the group's breakup in 1971, McDonald performed as a solo artist and in the spirit of Woody Guthrie, continued to musically espouse his political views through his original songs.
Early life and early career McDonald was born in Washington, D.C., on January 1, 1942, and grew up in El Monte, California, where he had moved with his parents, Florence and Worden McDonald.
His father, Worden, was born in Oklahoma and raised on a farm from Woody Guthrie's birthplace of Okemah. Worden worked for the phone company and, as a young man, traveled the country riding the rails, working odd jobs. His mother, Florence Plotnick, was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and served for many years as the City Auditor of Berkeley, California. In their youth, both were Communist Party members and named their son after Joseph Stalin, though they later renounced the cause.
In high school, McDonald was the conductor and president of the marching band. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and spent three years stationed in Japan. After his enlistment, he attended California State Los Angeles for a year, during which he started printing a small magazine called Et Tu. In the early 1960s, he dropped out of college and moved to Berkeley with his first wife hoping to become a folk musician. He began busking on Telegraph Avenue and worked at Jon and Dierdra Lundberg's guitar shop, Lundberg Fretted Instruments. He performed on Gert Chiarito's Midnight Special, an influential radio show on the local Berkeley station KPFA and formed the Berkeley String Quartet with Carl Shrager, Bob Cooper, and Bill Steele. He also formed the Instant Action Jug Band with future bandmate Barry Melton. Both bands frequently played at the Jabberwock folk music club and coffee shop on Telegraph Avenue.
McDonald became involved with the Free Speech Movement and the wave of demonstrations against the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley. In 1965, he and ED Denson, the co-founder with John Fahey of Takoma Records, launched Rag Baby, a magazine focused on the San Francisco folk music scene. McDonald proposed doing "talking issues" of the magazine in an EP format - audio supplements - which led him and Barry "The Fish" Melton to co-found Country Joe and the Fish. The band's first songs "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag", "Superbird", "Bass Strings", "Thing Called Love" and "Section 43" were self-released through these "talking issues" of Rag Baby. At the time, McDonald and Melton were living in the building behind the Jabberwock and sold Rag Baby at events on UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza and at Moe's Books on Telegraph. Denson began managing the band. Country Joe and the Fish played their first show under that name on November 5, 1965, joining The Fugs and Allen Ginsberg in a biology lecture room at UC Berkeley. McDonald was given the nickname "Country Joe" because Denson had heard that his namesake, Stalin, was known as "Country Joe" during World War II.
Music career
McDonald recorded over 30 albums and wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs in a career spanning the early 1960s to the mid-2010s. Country Joe & the Fish were a pioneer psychedelic rock band known for their eclectic performances at the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium, the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, the 1969 original Woodstock Festival, and the Woodstock '79 show at Madison Square Garden, along with the Woodstock Reunion 1979 at Parr Meadows racetrack near Brookhaven, Long Island.
By 1966, Country Joe & The Fish were signed to Vanguard Records and quickly released a series of albums produced by Sam Charters. Their debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body (May 1967), spent 38 weeks on the Billboard charts and is regarded as a seminal work of psychedelic rock. It was followed by the album I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die (November 1967), the title track of which spent 28 weeks on the Billboard chart and firmly established the band as key figures in the anti-war movement.
The band played numerous Bay Area shows throughout 1966 at the Avalon Ballroom, Filmore Auditorium and the Matrix with the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Buffalo Springfield, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Their next album, Together (1968), featured "Rock & Soul Music", which they performed at the Woodstock concert. The album, whose cover displayed wedding photos of McDonald's marriage to his new wife Robin, reached No. 23 on the Billboard charts, though internal tensions with the band were beginning to surface.
In January 1967, McDonald appeared at San Francisco's Polo Field for the first Human Be-In. Throughout the rest of the year—during the explosion of the San Francisco music scene and the Summer of Love—the band played nearly every day, sharing bills with the Grateful Dead, Steve Miller, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Paul Butterfield, the Youngbloods, Moby Grape, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Howlin' Wolf, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Canned Heat, Richie Havens, John Fahey, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, James Cotton Blues Band, Sam & Dave, and poets and writers such as Richard Brautigan and Kenneth Patchen.
In April 1967, they performed at the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam alongside Eldridge Cleaver, Coretta Scott King, Judy Collins, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Robert Scheer. They also appeared at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Festival on Mount Tamalpais with the Doors, the Byrds, Hugh Masekela, Tim Buckley, and Captain Beefheart. The band frequently played political events, including a benefit for the Delano grape strikers, and gave two performances at San Quentin Prison—once in 1967 with the Grateful Dead and again in 1969 with the Sons of Champlin.
In 1969, the band released Here We Are Again, which featured guest appearances by Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and David Getz and Peter Albin of Big Brother & The Holding Company. The album spent 11 weeks on the Billboard charts and included Here I Go Again, later covered by Twiggy. Their final Vanguard album, CJ Fish (1970), was produced by Tom Wilson, renowned for his work with Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Velvet Underground. Shortly after its release, the band disbanded.
His best known song,"The Fish Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" (1965), is a black comedy novelty song about the Vietnam War, whose familiar chorus"One, two, three, what are we fighting for?"became widely known amongst the Woodstock generation and Vietnam veterans of the 1960s and '70s. McDonald wrote the song in about 20 minutes for an anti-Vietnam War play, and told The New York Times that he "was inspired to write a folk song about how soldiers have no choice in the matter but to follow orders, but with the irreverence of rock 'n' roll. It's essentially punk before punk existed."
The original Fish Cheer consisted of the band leading the audience in a call-and-response with the audience, spelling the word "F-I-S-H," with McDonald yelling out, "What's that spell?" twice, the audience responding, and then a third call immediately followed by the song. In the wake of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the cheer evolved into the "Fuck Cheer", in which he led the crowd at Woodstock in 1969. The F-I-S-H Cheer appeared on the original recording of "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" on the LP I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die. It quickly became popular, with audiences enthusiastically joining in during live performances.
During the summer of 1968, while the band was playing the Schaefer Music Festival tour,Country Joe McDonald, "That Notorious Cheer", accessed October 10, 2007. drummer Gary "Chicken" Hirsh suggested to spell the word "fuck" instead of "fish". Although the audience embraced it, festival management did not and banned the band off the tour for life. The Ed Sullivan Show then canceled a scheduled appearance, telling them to keep the money they had already been paid in exchange for never playing on the show. The modified cheer remained a staple at most of the band's live shows throughout the years, including Woodstock.
In Worcester, Massachusetts, McDonald was arrested for obscenity and fined $500 for uttering "fuck" in public.cited in Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music citing Pop-music/Rock by Philippe Daufouy and Jean-Pierre Sarton (Champ Libre, 1972). Although the song could not be played on the radio, it went on to appear in such films and television, including Hamburger Hill, More American Graffiti, and HBO's Generation Kill, in which U.S. Marines sing it while on patrol.
Solo career McDonald's first two solo albums, Thinking of Woody Guthrie (1969) and Tonight, I'm Singing Just For You (1970), were recorded for Vanguard in Nashville, Tennessee, with Sam Charters producing and Nashville A-Team players Hargus "Pig" Robbins, Grady Martin, and Buddy Harmon. Tonight, I'm Singing Just For You, which featured him, his wife and daughter on the cover, also featured the gospel group The Jordanairs.
Thinking of Woody Guthrie was one of first major Woody Guthrie tribute albums, and established McDonald as a prominent interpreter of Guthrie's work, which he had admired since youth. The album led to his participation in the 1970 Woody Guthrie All-Star Tribute at the Hollywood Bowl with Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Peter Fonda, and Will Geer. For the event, at the request of Marjorie Guthrie, Woody's widow, and Harold Leventhal, McDonald set Guthrie's Woman At Home to music. This was the first time the Guthrie family collaborated with a recording artist to add music to Woody Guthrie's lyrics.
McDonald's third solo album, War, War, War, (1971) featured the poems of Robert W. Service, set to music. In 1972, a live performance at the Bitter End, was released as Incredible Live!, featuring liner notes from Studs Terkel. His 1973 Vanguard LP Paris Sessions, was reviewed by Robert Christgau in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), in which he said: "Amazing. The man (repeat: man) has written feminist songs that are both catchy and sensible. Despite the real/honest prison poem and the silly, outdated record fan routines, his best in about five years."
Activism In January 1970, McDonald testified at the Chicago Seven Trial. He was one of the over one hundred witnesses the defense called, including Norman Mailer, Dick Gregory, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and Allen Ginsberg. During the trial Judge Julius J. Hoffman forbade him from singing "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-To-Die-Rag" in court. McDonald recited the lyrics instead.
In 1971, McDonald joined the FTA Show, an antiwar traveling vaudeville show, performing alongside Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Holly Near, Ben Vereen, and members of The Committee. He released a three-song EP Resist! with Grootna, and raised funds for the show, which was written in part at his home. He grew disenchanted by the show, which his then-wife Robin was a writer on, and left before the filming of the FTA Show documentary, though his involvement with the show landed him on Richard Nixon's "enemies list".