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 100 miles 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 Fixing-To-Die-Rag”, “Superbird”, “Bassstrings”, “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 Bookstore 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 chemistry lab 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
Country Joe McDonald (Kralingen, 1970)
McDonald recorded 33 albums and wrote hundreds of songs over a career spanning 60 years. 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, and the original 1969 Woodstock Festival and the 1979 reunion.
By 1966, Country Joe & The Fish were signed to Vanguard Records and quickly released a series of albums produced by Sam Charters. Their debut, Electric Music for the Mind and Body (May 1967), which 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. Electric Music for the Mind and Body remained on the Billboard chart for nearly two years.
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.
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In 2003 McDonald was sued for copyright infringement over his signature song, specifically the “One, two, three, what are we fighting for?” chorus part, as derived from the 1926 early jazz classic “Muskrat Ramble”, co-written by Kid Ory. The suit was brought by Ory’s daughter Babette, who held the copyright at the time. Since decades had already passed from the time McDonald composed his song in 1965, Ory based her suit on a new version of it recorded by McDonald in 1999. The California district court, however, upheld McDonald’s laches defense, noting that Ory and her father were aware of the original version of the song, with the same questionable section, for some three decades without bringing a suit. The court awarded McDonald reasonable attorneys’ fees and permitted him to file a bill of costs.
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Work with Vietnam veterans
McDonald’s long-standing commitment to Vietnam veterans and the peace movement was in evidence throughout his career and remains part of his legacy. He successfully led the effort to create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Berkeley, California, and was involved in establishing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in San Francisco. He performed at GI coffeehouses and commemorative events and benefits across the country for organizations such as San Francisco’s Sword to Plowshares, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and at ceremonies at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. He also took part in the three-day Vietnam War Summit at the LBJ Library in 2016, appearing alongside notable figures such as former Secretary of State John Kerry, filmmaker Ken Burns, activist Tom Hayden, Henry Kissinger, and musician Peter Yarrow.
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Personal life and death
McDonald was married to Kathe Werum from 1963 to 1966. McDonald noted that his girlfriend at the time was Janis Joplin. Although angered when he left her for another woman, Robin Menken, Joplin asked him to write a song about her; the result was “Janis”. On March 31, 1968, McDonald married Menken, a year after his divorce from Werum.
In 1968, Robin Menken gave birth to the couple’s first daughter, Seven Anne McDonald, in San Francisco. A television child actor in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she later managed Johnny Depp’s Viper Room nightclub and the alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins.
McDonald had four other children: Devin (born 1976) and Tara (born 1980) from his marriage to Janice Taylor, and Emily (born 1988) and Ryan (born 1991) from his marriage to Kathy Wright.
McDonald died of complications from Parkinson’s disease at his Berkeley, California, home, on March 7, 2026, at the age of 84.
This is an extensive biography; read more at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_Joe_McDonald