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"Country" Joe McDonald was a hippie rock star of the 1960s whose I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag was a four-lettered rebuke to the Vietnam War that became an anthem for protesters and a highlight of the Woodstock music festival.
McDonald, who performed with his band, Country Joe and the Fish, was a feature in the Bay Area music scene of the 1960s, where peers included the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and his onetime girlfriend, Janis Joplin.
He wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs but he was known best for a talking blues he completed in less than an hour in 1965 — the year United States 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, with a chorus concertgoers and others would learn by heart.
The song helped make him famous, but brought legal and professional consequences. 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 continued touring and recording for decades after Woodstock, but remained defined by the late 1960s, a time period he openly longed for in the late 1970s rocker Bring Back the Sixties, Man.
Joe McDonald died on March 7, aged 84. — Allied Media/agencies