Country Joe McDonald has recorded 33 albums and has written hundreds of songs over a career spanning 60 years. In 1965, he and Barry Melton co-founded Country Joe & the Fish which became a pioneer psychedelic rock band with their eclectic performances at the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium, the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and both the 1969 original and 1979 reunion Woodstock Festivals.

“Legendary Artists: Sounds of San Francisco” at an Audio Engineering Society convention in 2012. Left to right: Mario Cipollina, Peter Albin, Joel Selvin, McDonald

Their best-known song is his “The “Fish” Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing’-to-Die Rag” (1965), a black comedy novelty song about the Vietnam War, whose familiar chorus (“One, two, three, what are we fighting for?”) is well known to the Woodstock generation and Vietnam veterans of the 1960s and ’70s. McDonald wrote the song in about 20 minutes for an anti-Vietnam War play. The “Fish Cheer” was the band performing a call-and-response with the audience, spelling the word “fish”, followed by Country Joe yelling, “What’s that spell?” twice, with the audience responding, and then, the third time, “What’s that spell?”, followed immediately by the song. The “Fish Cheer” evolved into the “Fuck Cheer” after the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. .