The name may not mean much to the younger readers but I one served in Vietnam then Country Joe and the Fish was the anti-war song that meant the most.

The anti-war icon has died….

A voice that helped soundtrack the Vietnam era has gone quiet, USA Today reports. “Country Joe” McDonald, the frontman of Country Joe and the Fish and a defining figure of 1960s protest music, died Saturday in Berkeley, Calif., at 84 from complications of Parkinson’s disease, his band announced. He was “surrounded by his family,” according to the statement; no public memorial is planned.

Born Joseph Allen McDonald in Washington, DC, and raised in California, he served in the Navy before emerging in Berkeley’s folk and protest scene and co-founding Country Joe and the Fish in the mid-1960s. Their 1967 debut, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, helped cement San Francisco’s psychedelic rock sound, but McDonald became best known for his biting anti-Vietnam War song “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” (a “talking blues” song done in the “deadpan” style of Woody Guthrie, the Guardian reports) and his expletive-laced cheer at Woodstock—moments he later said “changed everything in America.” NPR calls the song “a signature anthem of the 1960s counterculture,” and the Woodstock performance “one of the defining scenes of the festival.” The cheer, however, did once get McDonald arrested and fined after he used it at a Massachusetts show.

After his band broke up, McDonald continued to perform and release solo work for decades, often focusing on civil rights, environmental causes, and humanitarian issues, before retiring to focus on his family. He also expressed consistent support for the troops, and was involved with veterans’ issues throughout his life. He is survived by his wife of 43 years, five children, and four grandchildren; the family suggests donations to Swords to Ploughshares or the Michael J. Fox Foundation in his memory.

For me his voice and conscience will be missed for he help us antiwar protesters get through all the torment….

Thank you for your help and your voice in protest to a dumb ass war…..you and your morals will be missed.

Plus old farts like me will not forget what you did in our name.

His most famous antiwar song in remembrance of a great musician for the cause.

Thank you Country Joe and may you rest in peace.

chuq