Woodstock Star, Country Joe McDonald, has passed away at the age of 84.
Joe McDonald, who was also known as “Country Joe,” died Saturday evening. The legend was best known for the song I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag, which was a Vietnam protest song that he performed in 1969 at the Woodstock Festival. The singer, whose real name was Joseph Allen McDonald, passed away from Parkinson’s in Berkeley.
Joe was the co-founder of the band Country Joe and the Fish with guitarist Barry Melton. The group released its debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, in 1967. While talking about the beginning of the band, McDonald has expressed,
“I moved to Berkeley in the summer of 1965, after the Free Speech Movement. So I came up here from southern California and got miraculously tapped into the folk music thing that was happening here at that time. I met Barry Melton at the University of California folk festival, and we hit it off. I started playing a few of my songs, and he played lead guitar. We were a duo.” He further added, “Then I met some other people, and Ed Denson, Mike Beardslee and I started putting out a little magazine called Rag Baby… a biweekly that had music articles and schedules of things that were happening around town, music and dancing and events. It was mostly focused on folk music and the folk scene.”
Even though the band disbanded in 1971, Joe McDonald continued writing and releasing solo songs addressing environmental issues and civil rights. In a 2016 interview with Street Spirit, he stated,
“I grew up in a family of radical socialists, and quite honestly, I really get bored with the theory and speechifying of various movements and philosophies from the left. It doesn’t mean I don’t support them. But as an entertainer, I know that you can lose your audience. I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and I consider myself a morale-booster for these causes. I don’t do it if I don’t support the cause and the ideas and the people that are doing it.”
He continued, “It’s really quite remarkable what people are doing in many movements. I like to support these movements, because they are sometimes not mainstream and no one else is supporting them, and so I feel an obligation to do it. As an activist, I like to give a voice and to support people and movements that don’t have mainstream support and visibility. And I realize that my name has a certain notoriety and that my presence can be a morale-booster.”
Joe McDonald is survived by his wife, Kathy Wright, and reportedly five children.
Edited by Sroban Ghosh