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NEW YORK (AP) — “Country” Joe McDonald, a 1960s hippie rock star whose “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was a four-letter rebuke of the Vietnam War that became an anthem for protesters and a highlight of the Woodstock music festival, died Sunday. He was 84 years old.

McDonald, who performed with his band Country Joe and the Fish, 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.

McDonald was a long-time presence in the Bay Area music 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 that he completed in less than an hour in 1965 (the year President Lyndon Johnson began sending ground forces to Vietnam) and that he recorded at the Berkeley home of Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz.

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, with a chorus that concertgoers and others would learn by heart:

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At the time he wrote “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag”, McDonald was co-leader of the newly formed 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 his group appeared at Woodstock in 1969, the Fish were on the verge of disbanding, the chant was a different four-letter word starting with “F,” and McDowell was performing to hundreds of thousands. Many stood and sang, a moment captured in the Woodstock documentary released the following year. (For the film, the song’s lyrics appeared as subtitles, with a bouncing ball on top.)

“Some people alluded to peace and stuff (at Woodstock), but I was talking about Vietnam,” McDonald told The News 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.

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In 2001, the daughter of the late jazz musician Edward “Kid” Ory sued McDonald, alleging that the melody of her song closely resembled Ory’s 1920s jazz instrumental “Muskrat Blues.” A U.S. district judge in California ruled in favor of McDonald’s, citing in part the “unreasonable” delay between the release of the song and the filing of the lawsuit.

A man from the 60s

McDonald continued to tour and record for decades after Woodstock, but remained defined by the late 1960s, a period he openly longed for on the late-1970s rocker “Bring Back the Sixties, Man.” 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 would acknowledge mixed feelings about Vietnam. He had served in the Navy in Japan in the late 1950s and found himself identifying both with the protesters and with those serving overseas. In the 1990s, he helped organize the construction of a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Berkeley, formally dedicated in 1995.

“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. He was involved off and on with Joplin during the second half of the 1960s, two young hippies whose careers and temperaments drove them apart. When McDonald told her that he thought they should break up, she asked him to write a song, which became the ballad “Janis”:

Although I know that you and I

We could never find the kind of love we wanted

Together, alone, I find myself

Missing you and me

You and I

___

Raised on politics and music.

Country Joe McDonald didn’t come from “country.” He was born on January 1, 1942 in Washington, DC and grew up in El Monte, California. He was the son of former communists who named him Josef Stalin and encouraged him to love music and identify with the working class. He was still a teenager when he began writing songs, playing the trombone well enough to lead his high school marching band, and teaching himself folk, country, and blues songs on the guitar.

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After returning from the Navy in the early 1960s, he attended Los Angeles State College, but soon moved to Berkeley and immersed himself in folk music and political activism. He founded an underground magazine, Rag Baby, which “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was written to help promote, and helped start local groups such as the Instant Action Jug Band and the Berkeley String Quartet.

In 1965, he formed Country Joe and the Fish with fellow singer-guitarist Barry “The Fish” Melton, later adding Bruce Barthol on bass, organist David Bennett Cohen and Gary “Chicken” Hirsh on drums. The name was suggested by magazine editor Eugene “ED” Denson, who cited a quote from Mao Zedong that revolutionaries are “the fish that swim in the sea of ​​the people.” McDonald was nicknamed “Country Joe” because Denson had heard that Stalin was known as “Country Joe” during World War II.

Like Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds and other bands, the Fish evolved from folk to folk-rock to acid rock. “Electric Music for the Mind and Body”, their debut album, was released in May 1967 and featured a minor hit, “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine”, along with numerous long improvisations. A month after the album’s release, they performed at the Monterey Pop Festival, the first major rock gathering and highlight of the so-called Summer of Love.

“I think the ‘Summer of Love’ thing was manufactured by the media or something, because I don’t remember us thinking, ‘Wow, this is the ‘Summer of Love,'” he told aquariandrunkard.com in 2018. “(But) I was excited to be a part of this new counterculture and new tribe because I had never really felt comfortable with the other tribes that I was a part of growing up and in the Navy. Actually, my parents were Jewish communists. “I never felt part of it, but I was really excited and happy to be a hippie.”