Barry Melton
Barry The Fish Melton is the cofounder and original lead guitarist of Country Joe and The Fish. Barry appears on all the Country Joe and The Fish recordings and he also wrote some of the songs that the band recorded. He appeared in the films made at Monterey Pop and Woodstock, and also appeared as an outlaw in the neoWestern film, Zachariah, and other films in which Country Joe and the Fish appear. Melton is also a founding member of The Dinosaurs.
Melton was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of secretary Taube Tillie and James Melton, an air conditioning and refrigeration engineer who taught at Los Angeles City College. His mother was from an East Coast Jewish family and his father was from a Texas pioneer family and shares ancestry in colonial Virginia with George Washington, as well as deep roots in Ireland. Raised in Brooklyns Brighton Beach neighborhood and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California, Melton served as a Congress of Racial Equality volunteer during Freedom Summer and participated in a demonstration against Trn L Xun during her SeptemberOctober 1963 lecture tour of Europe and the United States. Having previously studied under Kay Kyser guitarist Milton Norman for much of his youth at the instigation of his parents, Melton befriended future CountryJoeandTheFish member Bruce Barthol in his high schools folk music club after ascending to the presidency of that organization, Melton became ensconced in t
Source: Wikipedia