Country Joe McDonald died March 6 in Berkeley, California, at 84. The cause was complications from Parkinson's disease. [1] His obituaries ran in March. This week, they are circulating again.

The reason is not difficult to identify. McDonald's signature moment was the 1969 Woodstock festival, where he led an estimated 400,000 people in the "Fish Cheer" — a call-and-response that spelled out an obscenity aimed at the Vietnam War and the government prosecuting it. The cheer preceded his performance of "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag," a song that treated American war-making as a commercial transaction: "Whoopee! we're all gonna die." [2]

He was born January 1, 1942, in Washington, D.C., grew up in El Monte, California, and co-founded Country Joe and the Fish, a psychedelic rock group central to the San Francisco scene of the 1960s. [3] He spent the decades after Woodstock as an organizer and advocate, never distancing himself from the political commitments that made the Fish Cheer possible.

The Guardian's obituary called him "the troubadour of Vietnam-era disillusionment." [4] NPR's remembered him as the man who "electrified Woodstock." [1] Both are true. What his obituaries could not have known when they were written is that his songs would begin recirculating in a week when the United States is striking power plants in Iran and a ceasefire proposal and a bombing campaign arrived on the same day. Some songs age badly. Some age into relevance they never lost.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York