Patti Smith

Patti Smith (born December 30, 1946, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American poet, songwriter, singer, and visual artist who blazed a trail for punk rock artists, especially women, in the 1970s. With her androgynous appearance, intense live performances, and penchant for writing lyrics that often blend poetry with subversive themes, Smith earned herself such titles as “godmother of punk” and “punk’s poet laureate.” She retreated from public view in the 1980s but mounted a successful return to performing in the 1990s. Following her comeback, she published several acclaimed memoirs about her life and career as one of rock’s most avant-garde artists.

(Read Britannica’s essay “Are Song Lyrics Poetry?”)

Early life

Smith was born in Chicago in 1946 to Grant Smith, a World War II veteran who worked as a machinist in a Honeywell factory, and Beverly Smith (née Williams), a former jazz singer who worked as a waitress. Their family, which at the time consisted of eldest daughter Patti, middle child Linda, and youngest child Todd, frequently moved before settling in New Jersey when Patti was nine. (Smith’s youngest sister, Kimberly, was born a few years after the family moved to New Jersey.)

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Famous Poets and Poetic Form

Growing up, Smith was prone to illness and variously contracted tuberculosis, measles, and other infectious diseases. At one point she was sent to stay with relatives in Tennessee to quarantine and recuperate. For this reason and because of her deep interest in books and art, she identified as a social outsider from a young age. Among her favorite writers and artists were French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud and American folk musician and songwriter Bob Dylan. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, she also attended a Presbyterian Sunday school while living in Tennessee. She left organized religion when she was 12 or 13, however, because of her devotion to art. As she later wrote in her 2025 memoir Bread of Angels, “I was told that there was no place for art in Christ’s Kingdom, and I was counseled to consider what I truly believed in. But I knew what I believed in.”

After graduating from high school, Smith won an art scholarship to Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), a teachers college in New Jersey. While participating in a theater program, she discovered that she liked performing. In 2008 Smith told Philadelphia magazine, “I could get straight A’s in art, writing and student teaching, but I didn’t have the stuff to get through trigonometry.” Although she has cited this difficulty as her reason for dropping out after three years, about this time she unexpectedly became pregnant and put her baby up for adoption.

Move to New York City and beginnings as an artist

In 1967 she moved to New York City, where she became active in the downtown Manhattan arts scene, writing poetry, coauthoring and costarring in the play Cowboy Mouth with Sam Shepard, and living with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Her performance-driven poetry readings soon took on a musical component, and from 1971 she worked regularly with the guitarist and critic Lenny Kaye. By 1973 they had formed a band and began performing widely in the downtown club scene. Continuing to identify as a poet—or, perhaps, seeing no dissonance between poetry and rock music—Smith published the collections Seventh Heaven (1972) and Wītt (1973) as her music career was developing.

The following year Kaye produced Smith’s first record, featuring a provocative cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” (it opens with a spoken-word monologue about heiress turned alleged leftist radical Patty Hearst) and the original track “Piss Factory,” which was inspired by Smith’s experience working on an assembly line as a teenager. Her mesmeric charisma, chantlike but hoarsely compelling musical declamation, visionary texts, and simple but ingenious rock music won her an intense cult following.

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Horses

Signed to a contract with Arista Records, she released her first album, Horses, in 1975; it was produced by John Cale, the Welsh avant-gardist and cofounder (with Lou Reed) of the Velvet Underground. Often considered her purest, truest album, it replicated her live shows better than any subsequent LP. Its opening track, “Gloria,” begins with the infamous line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” before launching into a cover of Them’s “Gloria” (with lyrics largely rewritten by Smith).

The rest of the songs are a similar mix of spoken-word poetry, transgressive lyrics about sex, religion, and violence, samples and interpolations of early rock and roll, and rapturous odes to Rimbaud. Even its cover, featuring a black-and-white photograph by Mapplethorpe, was arresting, highlighting Smith’s gender-bending beauty.

(Read Britannica’s “List of Albums That Turned 50 in 2025.”)

Other albums of the 1970s, retirement in the ’80s, and comeback in the ’90s

Later albums of the 1970s moved in a more commercial direction, with a pounding big beat that bludgeoned away some of her subtlety; at the same time her concerts often became sloppy and undisciplined. After Radio Ethiopia (1976) she released her most commercially successful album, Easter, in 1978. It included a hit single, “Because the Night,” written with Bruce Springsteen. That year she published the poetry collection Babel.

Following the album Wave in 1979, Smith disbanded her group and retired to Detroit, where she raised a family with guitarist Fred (“Sonic”) Smith, founding member of the band MC5. Although she recorded an album with her husband in 1988 (Dream of Life) and began working on new songs with him a few years later, it was only after his sudden death from a heart attack in 1994, followed a month later by the death of her brother, that her comeback began in earnest. (She had also suffered the loss of Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, and of her former pianist, Richard Sohl, in 1990.)

Gone Again appeared in 1996 and was followed by Peace and Noise (1997) and Gung Ho (2000). Fans and critics alike welcomed her return. The song “1959,” from Peace and Noise, earned Smith her first Grammy Award nomination, for best female rock vocal performance. She was nominated again a few years later for “Glitter in Their Eyes,” from Gung Ho. Meanwhile, she published more of her poetry, including the collections Early Work, 1970–1979 (1994) and The Coral Sea (1996).

Smith continued releasing new records in the 21st century, among them Banga (2012). If anything, that late work showed her stronger than before, full of the old fire but purged of her more extreme excesses. She later collaborated with the international sound-art group Soundwalk Collective for a trilogy consisting of The Peyote Dance (2019), Mummer Love (2019), and Peradam (2020). In 2025 she worked again with Soundwalk Collective on the album Khandroma.

Memoirs and other literary ventures

In 2010 Smith published the memoir Just Kids, which focuses on her relationship with Mapplethorpe and their development as young artists making their way in New York City. The critically acclaimed work won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Her other memoirs include M Train (2015), about her travels and her love for coffee and detective shows, and Year of the Monkey (2019), which includes some of her photographs and reflections on death and aging.

In 2016 Smith accepted Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature on his behalf, performing his song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the award ceremony in Stockholm. She later penned an essay for The New Yorker about the experience, including her memory of hearing Dylan’s music for the first time:

I thought of my mother, who bought me my first Dylan album when I was barely sixteen. She found it in the bargain bin at the five-and-dime and bought it with her tip money. “He looked like someone you’d like,” she told me. I played the record over and over, my favorite being “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” It occurred to me then that, although I did not live in the time of Arthur Rimbaud, I existed in the time of Bob Dylan.

Smith’s book on creativity, Devotion (2017), is an installment in Yale University Press’s Why I Write series. She later published A Book of Days (2022), which was inspired by her Instagram account. In the meantime she was reunited with the daughter whom she had put up for adoption. Smith revisited an incident in 1977 when she fell off the stage during a concert and fractured her neck in Before Easter After (2024), which also features photographs by Lynn Goldsmith. In 2025 Smith published another memoir, Bread of Angels, which contains revelations about her parentage that Smith discovered later in life.

Legacy and honors

Although she never topped the charts, Smith precipitated punk rock in New York, London, Los Angeles, and beyond. A pioneer in the fusion of the bohemian sensibility with rock, she was able to translate the incantatory power of Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs into the rock mainstream.

In 2007 Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by France’s Ministry of Culture in 2005, and in 2011 the Royal Swedish Academy of Music awarded her the Polar Music Prize for her contributions to music and art. In 2009 the U.S. Library of Congress added Horses to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”