R.I.P. Country Joe McDonald: “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” songwriter dead at 84

The son of a Presbyterian minister, McDonald was born in Washington, D.C. on New Year’s Day, 1942. He grew up in El Monte, California, and was a student conductor and president of his high schoo’s marching band. At age 17, McDonald served three years in the U.S. Navy before attending California State University, Los Angeles. At college, he started his own magazine, Et Tu, but dropped out to pursue folk music in Berkelely, busking up and down Telegraph Avenue while working at Lundberg Fretted Instruments. McDonald played on radio shows and formed his own bands, including the Berkeley String Quartet and the Instant Action Jug Band. He met Barry Melton in the Instant Action Jug Band, and Melton went on to be the primary guitarist for McDonald’s lifelong group, Country Joe and the Fish. During his career, McDonald cited Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger as two of his biggest inspirations. 

He spent the next period of his life rallying for the Free Speech Movement, gigging at the Jabberwock club on Telegraph Avenue, attending anti-Vietnam War demonstrations at UC Berkeley, running Rag Baby magazine with ED Denson, and writing “talking issues” of the magazine. Those “talking issues” included “Superbird,” “Bassstrings,” “Thing Called Love,” and “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die-Rag,” McDonald’s most famous tune, which he and the Fish re-recorded for their second album and performed at Woodstock in 1969 (where he memorably led the crowd in an “f-u-c-k” chant that made the concert’s accompanying film). The novelty song about the war’s escalation and America’s involvement spent 28 weeks on the Billboard charts and has lived on as one of the great protest anthems of its time. McDonald recorded 33 albums in his 60-year career, and Country Joe and the Fish became a Bay Area fixture, doing shows with the Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Big Brother and the Holding Company.

McDonald always wove politics into his music. In 1970, he testified in the Chicago Seven Trial alongside Norman Mailer, Phil Ochs, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Collins, and Arlo Guthrie, where he recited the lyrics to “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag.” In 1971, he joined an anti-war FTA show with Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda, which landed him on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” He became heavily involved in the Save the Whales movement in the 1970s and worked with Greenpeace. Throughout his life, he remained committed to organizing on behalf of Vietnam veterans, and his efforts led to the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Berkeley. He regularly performed at GI coffeehouses, benefits, and ceremonies. In 1986, McDonald, Brian Wilson, and Neil Young put on the Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans benefit concert at the LA Forum. 30 years later, he joined Ken Burns, Henry Kissinger, Peter Yarrow, and John Kerry at a three-day Vietnam War Summit at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. 

In an interview with the New York Times in 2017, McDonald spoke about “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag,” calling it “punk rock before punk existed.” Watch Country Joe and the Fish play the song at Woodstock below.