Although he released more than 30 solo albums as well as six studio LPs and two live albums with Country Joe and the Fish, there is one song for which Country Joe McDonald, who has died aged 84, will always be remembered. This was I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag, the title track from his band’s second album, released in 1967.

The Fish never enjoyed huge chart success – their album Together reached No 23 in the US in 1968 – while the I-Feel-Like … album reached only No 67. But they channelled the political turmoil of late 1960s America as the country grappled with the Vietnam war, race riots and assassinations. They were also notable contributors, alongside the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, to the psychedelic rock scene that enveloped San Francisco’s Bay Area in light shows and LSD-fuelled improvisations.

If McDonald’s band did not achieve Beatles-like sales, I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag gained universal exposure and lasting renown when he sung it, solo with just an acoustic guitar, at the Woodstock festival in 1969.

The song’s caustic black humour struck a loud chord with the 400,000-strong audience members, who had become miserably accustomed to Vietnam’s bloodbaths and body-counts – “come on mothers throughout the land, pack your boys off to Vietnam…” he sang. “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.” The performance became one of the best remembered highlights of the subsequent Woodstock movie.

Prior to Country Joe and the Fish, McDonald had been a member of such combos as the Instant Action Jug Band (which also featured guitarist Barry Melton, whose nickname was “The Fish”) and the Berkeley String Quartet.

He also appeared on the Midnight Special radio show on the KPFA radio station in Berkeley, California, and in 1965, with Eugene “ED” Denson, launched the San Francisco music magazine Rag Baby. Denson also became the manager of Country Joe and the Fish (featuring the Melton-McDonald partnership), and they played their first gig in 1965 at the University of California, Berkeley, alongside the Fugs and the beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

Initially the Fish were an acoustic folk group, but within a few months they had evolved into an electric rock band. They released their debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, in 1967. A single taken from it, Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine, gave the group their sole entry on the Billboard singles chart, reaching 98.

Born in Washington DC, Joe was the son of Florence (nee Plotnik) and her husband, Worden, but grew up in El Monte, California. His father had been born in Oklahoma and grew up on a farm about 100 miles from Okemah, birthplace of the activist and folk singer Woody Guthrie.

In California, Worden was employed by a telephone company. Florence was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and served for many years as Berkeley’s city auditor. Both parents were Communist party members and named their son after Joseph Stalin, whose nickname was “Country Joe”.

“My family were the only communists in the entire area, and we lived a very isolated life,” McDonald told Let It Rock magazine in 1974. In the 50s his father lost his job after being called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was on a mission to weed out communists in the US.

Joe’s introduction to playing music came via a Hawaiian guitar owned by his father, and he began writing songs in his teens. He also played the trombone competently enough to lead the Arroyo high school marching band in El Monte.

At 17 he enlisted in the US Navy, and was stationed in Japan for three years. The experience prompted him to feel some sympathy for the military, and he would stress that Fixin’-to -Die Rag “just blamed the politicians and it blamed the manufacturers of weapons. It didn’t blame the soldiers.”

After his naval service he attended Los Angeles State College for a year, before moving to Berkeley, where he immersed himself in the Bay Area’s burgeoning early-60s folk music and political protest scene.

In 1969 McDonald launched his solo career by releasing the album Thinking of Woody Guthrie, a collection of Guthrie cover versions. The band dissolved in 1970 (though they would reunite for the Reunion album in 1977), and he continued recording and performing as a solo artist over the next several decades, in folk and rock styles and frequently with a political slant.

In 1970 he was one of the musicians, writers and activists who testified at the Chicago Seven trial, in which defendants including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin faced charges relating to anti-Vietnam war protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. McDonald was also heavily involved in the Save the Whales campaign in the 70s, and worked in support of Greenpeace.

On the albums War War War (1971) – based on poems by Robert W Service – and Vietnam Experience (1985), he explored themes of combat and its after effects. He was also a supporter of Vietnam veterans and helped to establish veterans’ memorials in Berkeley and San Francisco. In 1986 he appeared at the Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans benefit concert at the LA Forum, alongside Neil Young and Stevie Wonder.

He also made some forays into film and television. He appeared in Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s (1970), with Country Joe and the Fish in the “psychedelic Western” Zachariah (1971), starring Don Johnson, and in More American Graffiti (1979). In 1993 he featured in TV’s Tales of the City, based on Armistead Maupin’s novels.

McDonald’s first three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Kathy Wright, and their children, Ryan and Emily; by a daughter, Seven Anne, from his second marriage, to Robin Menken; and by a son, Devin, and daughter, Tara, from his third marriage, to Janice Taylor.

• Joseph Allen McDonald, singer and songwriter, born 1 January 1942; died 7 March 2026