Country Joe McDonald didn’t play country music but he did make a mark with his protest songs drenched in psychedelia.

I remember someone at my school having a record by a band called Country Joe and the Fish and I remember thinking: That’s not for me. I may well have been right – in my teens I was all about Glam – but I was wrong to think it had anything to do with country music. Or fish.

They were a psychedelic ’60s rock group from the San Francisco Bay Area who had first come to prominence at the Monterey Pop Festival in the 1967 Summer of Love, though I was too young to know about that.

It was another festival two years later that brought them to national attention when “Country Joe” McDonald appeared as a solo artist at Woodstock, getting the entire crowd to shout out “F-U-C-K” and performing the anti-Vietnam War song called I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag.

I didn’t think much of the song, which McDonald once described as “punk before punk existed,” but I have since discovered that the rest of their music is rather different, and much better.

McDonald had started out as a folk singer and his band played blues-influenced rock with a psychedelic twang. They had an exceptional guitarist in Barry Melton, and an excellent keyboard player (and blues guitarist) in Dave Cohen, whose organ swirls were almost as dominant a feature of their sound as Melton’s fluid guitar runs.

Somehow they’ve not been remembered in music history with the same reverence as their peers in San Francisco’s psychedelic scene, like The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Janis Joplin’s band, Big Brother & The Holding Company.

Their debut album, Electric Music For The Mind And Body, is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all psychedelic recordings, and while I would like to play my favourite number, the epic instrumental Section 43, it doesn’t really feature Country Joe.

So here’s their first single, Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine, which was the nearest they ever came to a hit when it crept into the Billboard Hot 100 chart at number 98 in 1967.

By the time of Woodstock all the band members bar Melton had quit (hence the solo appearance) and they broke up officially in 1970, though McDonald went on to record around 40 albums and remained an activist throughout his long life, ceaselessly campaigning for causes including peace, healthcare, animals and the environment.

Trivia fact(s): Born into a left-wing family, Joseph McDonald was named after Joe Stalin; he also served in the US Navy before becoming a musician.