Patti Smith

• 1. Introduction

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  Patti Smith, the American singer, songwriter, poet and author, lost her place in the middle of a song at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. The date was the 10th of December 2016. She was standing in for Bob Dylan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan could not attend because of prior commitments. After Horace Engdahl, the perpetual secretary of the Swedish Academy, gave the official presentation speech, Smith sang Dylan's “A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall.” Partway through, she sang one verse wrongly, producing the line “I saw the babe that was just bleedin',” and she was momentarily unable to continue. She apologized briefly, explained that she was nervous, and picked the song up again. When it ended, the hall answered with jubilant applause. A performer known for fusing rock with spoken poetry had stumbled on a very formal stage and recovered in front of the world. How did a girl from New Jersey come to be trusted with that song? What drew a poet toward rock and roll, and what did she carry with her when she arrived? And why do so many musicians point to her as the reason they started?

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• 2. Roots and Faith

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  Grant Hospital in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago is where Patricia Lee Smith was born on the 30th of December 1946. Her mother, Beverly, was a jazz singer who became a waitress. Her father, Grant, worked as a machinist for Honeywell. Patti was the eldest of four children, followed by Linda, Todd and Kimberly. A late twist arrived in her 2025 memoir Bread of Angels. There she revealed that, at the age of 70, she learned Grant Smith was not her biological father. Her paternal line, she discovered, is Ashkenazi Jewish, though the family had long been described as partly Irish.

  When Patti was four, the family left Chicago for the Germantown section of Philadelphia. They moved on to Pitman, New Jersey, and finally settled in the Woodbury Gardens section of Deptford Township, New Jersey. Music reached her early. Her mother gave her Another Side of Bob Dylan, the fourth album by Dylan, released in 1964. Other early listening included Harry Belafonte's Shrimp Boats and The Money Tree by Patience and Prudence.

  In 1964 she graduated from Deptford Township High School and took a job in a factory. She also spent a short time at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, New Jersey.

  Her upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness gave her a strong Biblical education. Around the age of 11 or 12, she developed an avid interest in Tibetan Buddhism. “I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer,” she has said. As a teenager, she walked away from organized religion because she found it too confining.

  As an adult, she came to see clear parallels among different faiths. She concluded that religious dogmas are “man-made laws that you can either decide to abide by or not.” That view did not keep her away from Rome. In 2014, Pope Francis invited her to play at a televised Vatican Christmas concert. Of her younger self she said, “I stand behind that 20-year-old girl, but I have evolved.”

  She returned to the Vatican in 2021. Speaking to Democracy Now!, she said she had studied Francis of Assisi back when Benedict XVI was pope. She called him “truly the environmentalist saint.” Though she is not a Catholic, she had hoped for a pope named Francis.

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• 3. Chelsea Years

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  In 1967, at age 20, Smith left Glassboro State College and moved to Manhattan. She found work at Scribner's bookstore alongside her friend, the poet Janet Hamill. On the 26th of April 1967, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter, and placed the baby for adoption.

  At the bookstore, she met the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Their romance was intense, and they struggled together with poverty and with Mapplethorpe's sexuality. His photographs later became the covers of her albums. At his request, she wrote essays for several of his books, including the posthumous Flowers. They remained friends until his death in 1989. In Just Kids, she calls him “the artist of my life.” She wrote that book to keep a promise she had made to him.

  In 1969, Smith went to Paris with her sister and began busking and doing performance art. Back in Manhattan, she moved into the Hotel Chelsea with Mapplethorpe. The pair frequented Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue.

  Art-world friends pulled her onto screens and stages. She supplied the spoken word soundtrack for Sandy Daley's art film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, which starred Mapplethorpe. The same year, she appeared with Jayne County in Jackie Curtis's play Femme Fatale. She also starred in Anthony Ingrassia's play Island. As a member of the Poetry Project, she spent the early 1970s painting, writing and performing. Her heart, meanwhile, belonged to Arthur Rimbaud. In a 1996 interview about her early influences, she said, “I had devoted so much of my girlish daydreams to Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud was like my boyfriend.”

  In 1971, she performed in Cowboy Mouth, a one-act play she co-wrote with Sam Shepard. She wrote several poems about Shepard and their relationship, among them “Sam Shepard: 9 Random Years (7 + 2).” On the 10th of February 1971, she gave her first public poetry performance, opening for Gerard Malanga. Lenny Kaye accompanied her on electric guitar.

  Rock music tugged at her from the side. She was briefly considered as lead singer for Blue Öyster Cult. She wrote lyrics for several of their songs, including “Career of Evil” and “Shooting Shark.” “Debbie Denise” grew out of her poem “In Remembrance of Debbie Denise,” and she sings duet vocals on “The Revenge of Vera Gemini.” At the time, she was romantically involved with the band's keyboardist, Allen Lanier. She also wrote about rock for Rolling Stone and Creem. Kaye, the guitarist from her first reading, is still in her band today.

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• 4. Horses and the Group

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  “Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.” Those are the first words Smith speaks on Horses, and they come from an early poem of hers called “Oath.” They open a record that begins with a cover of Van Morrison's “Gloria.” To reach that moment, she first needed a band.

  The lineup took shape in 1973, when Smith teamed up again with Kaye, a musician and rock archivist, and added Richard Sohl on piano. The trio grew into a full band with Ivan Král on guitar and bass and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. Sam Wagstaff paid for the group's first single, recorded in 1974. On the A-side, “Hey Joe” carried a spoken piece about Patty Hearst, a fugitive heiress. The B-side, “Piss Factory,” described the helpless alienation Smith felt on a factory assembly line. It also described her dream of salvation by escaping to New York City. Later that year, she recited her poem “I Wake Up Screaming” on an album by Ray Manzarek of The Doors, The Whole Thing Started with Rock & Roll Now It's Out of Control.

  In March 1975, the group began a two-month run of weekend shows at CBGB in New York, sharing the bill with the band Television. Clive Davis noticed them and signed them to Arista Records. Later that year, they recorded Horses, their 1975 debut, with producer John Cale amid some tension. The album fused punk rock with spoken poetry. The austere cover photograph by Mapplethorpe has become one of rock's classic images.

  As punk rock grew in popularity, the group toured the United States and Europe. Their rawer second album, Radio Ethiopia, reflected that mood. It was far less accessible than Horses and drew poor reviews at first. Several of its songs have endured, and Smith still performs them live. She has said that the band MC5 influenced the record.

  On the 23rd of January 1977, while touring for Radio Ethiopia, Smith danced off a high stage in Tampa, Florida. She fell 15 feet onto a concrete orchestra pit and broke several cervical vertebrae. The injury demanded rest and physical therapy. She says that time let her reassess, reenergize and reorganize her life.

  Easter arrived in 1978 and became the group's most commercially successful record. It held “Because the Night,” co-written with Bruce Springsteen, which climbed to number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number five on the UK Singles Chart. Wave followed in 1979 and sold less well. Even so, “Frederick” and “Dancing Barefoot” received commercial airplay. Smith dedicated both songs to Fred “Sonic” Smith.

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• 5. Return to the Stage

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  Fred “Sonic” Smith had played guitar for the Michigan band MC5 and for Sonic's Rendezvous Band. Like Patti, he adored poetry. In 1979, at about age 32, she separated from her long-time partner Allen Lanier. Friends joked that she married Fred only so she would not have to change her name. “Dancing Barefoot” drew on the tragic love of Jeanne Hébuterne for Amedeo Modigliani. The couple had a son, Jackson, born in 1982, and a daughter, Jesse Paris, born in 1987. Jackson was married to Meg White, drummer for The White Stripes, from 2009 to 2013. Jesse became a musician and composer.

  Most of the 1980s found Smith living with her family in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, semi-retired from music. She eventually moved back to New York City. In June 1988, she released Dream of Life, which included “People Have the Power.” Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Allen Ginsberg, whom she had known since her early New York years, urged her to return to live music and touring.

  Loss came in quick succession. Fred died of a heart attack on the 4th of November 1994, and soon afterward her brother Todd died suddenly. In December 1995, she toured briefly with Bob Dylan, a trip that Stipe documented in a book of photographs.

  In 1996, she recorded Gone Again with her long-time band. It included “About a Boy,” a tribute to Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana singer who died by suicide in 1994. That year she also joined Stipe on “E-Bow the Letter,” from R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and performed it live with the band. Peace and Noise followed in 1997, with the single “1959,” about China's invasion of Tibet. Gung Ho arrived in 2000, with songs about Ho Chi Minh and her late father. Smith was nominated for a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for both “1959” and “Glitter in Their Eyes.” A box set of remastered work, The Patti Smith Masters, followed.

  In 2002, she released Land (1975-2002), a two-CD compilation that included her cover of Prince's “When Doves Cry.” Trampin' arrived on the 27th of April 2004, with songs about motherhood, partly in tribute to her mother, who had died two years earlier. It was her first album for Columbia Records, which later became a sister label to Arista, her previous label. She curated the Meltdown festival in London, where she performed Horses live in its entirety for the first time. That performance was later released as Horses/Horses.

  The 15th of October 2006 brought the farewell to CBGB. Smith took the stage at 9:30 p.m. and played until a few minutes after 1:00 a.m. Her last song was “Elegie.” She then read a list of punk rock musicians and advocates who had died in recent years. It was the last public song and the last public words performed at the venue.

  Twelve, her tenth full-length release, consisted entirely of covers. It included Jimi Hendrix's “Are You Experienced?”, Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the Rolling Stones' “Gimme Shelter.” On the 10th of September 2009, after a week of smaller events and exhibitions in Florence, she played an open-air concert at Piazza Santa Croce. It marked her performance in the same city 30 years earlier. In 2011, she recorded Buddy Holly's “Words of Love” for a tribute album tied to his 75th birthday. She also recorded “Capitol Letter” for the soundtrack of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

  Banga, her 11th studio album, appeared in June 2012. American Songwriter compared her delivery to “the grace and determination of Muhammad Ali in his prime.” Metacritic gave the album a score of 81, which it labels “universal acclaim.” In 2015, she wrote “Aqua Teen Dream” to mark the series finale of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, recording the vocal in a hotel overlooking Lerici's Bay of Poets. On the 6th of December 2015, she joined U2 onstage in Paris for “Bad” and “People Have the Power.” During U2's Joshua Tree 2017 tour, she sang “Mothers of the Disappeared” with them in Detroit.

  In August 2025, she announced a re-release of Horses, due in October 2025 for the album's 50th anniversary. It features unreleased tracks, remasters and original recordings of several songs from the original track list.

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• 6. Protest Songs

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  In 1993, Smith contributed “Memorial Tribute (Live)” to No Alternative, an album that benefited AIDS causes. Her public activism grew from there. In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, she supported the Green Party and backed Ralph Nader. At his campaign rallies, she led crowds in singing “Over the Rainbow” and “People Have the Power.” She also performed at several of Nader's later Democracy Rising events.

  She was a speaker and singer at the first protests against the Iraq War, held as President George W. Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly. In 2004, she supported the Democratic candidate John Kerry, and Springsteen kept performing “People Have the Power” at Vote for Change campaign events. In the winter of 2004-05, she toured again with Nader at rallies against the Iraq War and called for the impeachment of Bush.

  Rachel Corrie was killed in March 2003, and ten days later Smith performed an anti-war concert at a venue in Austin, Texas. She went on to write “Peaceable Kingdom,” a song inspired by Corrie and dedicated to her.

  In September 2006, she premiered two new protest songs in London. Louise Jury, writing in The Independent, described them as “an emotional indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy.” “Qana” concerns the Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of that name. She wrote “Without Chains” out of outrage over Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany who was held for four years at Guantanamo Bay. In a 2009 interview, she said his family had contacted her. She wrote a short preface for the book he was writing, which was released in March 2008.

  At her 2009 Meltdown concert in Festival Hall, she honored Iranians protesting after their election. She worked the words “Where is My Vote?” into a version of “People Have the Power.” In 2015, she appeared with Nader at the American Museum of Tort Law convocation ceremony in Winsted, Connecticut. There she spoke and performed “Wing” and “People Have the Power.” The next year, she spoke, read poetry and sang at Nader's Breaking Through Power conference at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., together with her daughter Jesse.

  Every year, she performs at the Tibet House US benefit at Carnegie Hall. In 2020, a burglary at the Passages bookshop in Portland, Oregon, took valuable first editions by various authors. She responded by sending signed first-edition copies of her own books to the store. She regards climate change as the predominant issue of our time and performed at the opening of COP26 in 2021. In May 2021, she signed an open letter calling for a boycott of performances in Israel.

  On the 6th of March 2022, she wrote on Instagram about the Ukrainian anthem, calling her raw translation of it something she heard in her sleep. She described the anthem as one “the people are singing through defiant tears.” That same day, at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, she told the audience, “I would be lying if I said I wasn't affected by what is happening in the world.”

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• 7. Pictures and Pages

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  In 1994, Smith began devoting time to what she calls “pure photography,” a method of capturing still objects without using a flash. Her solo exhibition Strange Messenger opened at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh on the 28th of September 2002. From the 28th of March to the 22nd of June 2008, the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris hosted Land 250, a major show drawn from pieces she made between 1967 and 2007. In 2011, she announced Camera Solo, the first museum exhibition of her photography in the United States.

  She took the title from a sign she saw in the home of Pope Celestine V. It translates as “a room of one's own,” which she felt described her solitary way of photographing. The show displayed everyday items and places of significance to artists she admires, including Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, John Keats and William Blake. In January 2019, her photographs hung at the Diego Rivera gallery in the San Francisco Art Institute.

  In 2009, she wrote the introduction to Jessica Lange's book 50 Photographs. Her own memoir Just Kids was published in 2010, and later that year it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. A new edition appeared in 2018 with additional photographs and illustrations. The Coral Sea, a live album she made the following year with Kevin Shields, is another homage to Mapplethorpe.

  Fiction tempted her too. In 2011, she told NME, “I've been working on a detective story that starts at the St Giles in the Fields church in London for the last two years.” She added that she loved detective stories and had been a fan of Sherlock Holmes and the American crime writer Mickey Spillane in her youth. In 2019, she released Year of the Monkey. Kirkus Reviews called it “a captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.” Her third memoir, Bread of Angels, was published in November 2025.

  Correspondences, an ongoing project with the experimental group Soundwalk Collective, spans more than ten years. Its founder, Stephan Crasneanscki, records sounds in remote places to uncover traces of history and environmental change. He then shares them with Smith, who answers with poetry. The partnership began with a chance encounter on a plane and grew through ongoing letters about life and nature. Its themes include the effect of seismic airguns on the oceans, nature's resilience after the Chernobyl disaster, the anarchist visions of Peter Kropotkin, and the final landscapes of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

  On screen, she made a cameo in Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme, first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. At age 64, she made her television acting debut in the 2011 Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode “Icarus.” In 2017, she played herself in Terrence Malick's Song to Song, opposite Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling. Her 2018 concert documentary, Horses: Patti Smith and her Band, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. She also narrated Darren Aronofsky's virtual reality experience Spheres: Songs of Spacetime, alongside Millie Bobby Brown and Jessica Chastain.

  Abel Ferrara's 2024 documentary Turn in the Wound follows life in Kyiv since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Smith appears as herself and composed the music. She also reads poems by Antonin Artaud, René Daumal and Rimbaud. The film premiered at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival on the 16th of February 2024.

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• 8. Echoes and Honors

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  Todd Rundgren named her in print in 1972. The liner notes to his album Something/Anything? dedicate “Song of the Viking” to “Miss Patti Lee Smith.” He joked that he wrote it while gripped by a chronic ailment he called the dreaded “d'oyle carte.” Seven years later, he produced Wave, the final Patti Smith Group album.

  In 1979, Gilda Radner played Candy Slice, a character based on Smith, on Saturday Night Live. The Waterboys' debut single of 1983, “A Girl Called Johnny,” is a tribute to her.

  Courtney Love of Hole received Horses as a teenager in juvenile hall. In 2010, she credited Smith as a major influence. The record, she said, made her realize “that you could do something that was completely subversive that didn't involve violence or felonies. I stopped making trouble.” Hole's 1994 song “Violet” echoes lyrics from Smith's “Kimberly.” Morrissey and Johnny Marr of The Smiths share a love of Horses, and their song “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” reworks “Kimberly” too.

  In 2008, Michael Stipe said Horses was one of the albums that inspired him to start a punk band. Ten years earlier, he had published a book of photographs, Two Times Intro: On the Road with Patti Smith. He sings backing vocals on her “Last Call” and “Glitter in Their Eyes.”

  In 2000, The Go-Betweens dedicated “When She Sang About Angels” to her. Sonic Youth titled a 2004 album Hidros 3 (to Patti Smith). KT Tunstall released “Suddenly I See” in 2005 as a tribute of sorts. In 2018, Florence and the Machine dedicated “Patricia” to her, with lyrics naming her as Florence Welch's “North Star.” Orville Peck says Horses introduced him to a different way of making music. Elliot Page has restaged famous Smith photographs in photo shoots.

  Biographer Nick Johnstone notes that Smith is often revered as a feminist icon. The Guardian's Simon Hattenstone used that language in a 2013 profile. Smith herself has declined the label, saying, “I believe in human rights.” In 2015, the writer Anwen Crawford argued that Smith's view of genius treats true artists as remote, solitary figures wholly dedicated to their art.

  In July 2005, the French Minister of Culture named her a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. On the 12th of March 2007, she entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She dedicated the honor to the memory of her late husband, Fred, and performed “Gimme Shelter.” Her “People Have the Power” closed the ceremony as the big celebrity jam.

  Steven Sebring's documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life came out in 2008. That year, Rowan University gave her an honorary doctorate for her contributions to popular culture. Rolling Stone ranked her 47th on its list of the 100 greatest artists, and later 117th among the 200 greatest singers. She won the Polar Music Prize in 2011, as one of several winners that year. In 2012, Pratt Institute awarded her an honorary doctorate in fine arts. She told its graduates she would never have been accepted there when she moved to New York in 1967, yet most of her friends, Mapplethorpe among them, were students at Pratt.

  Horses entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2021. In 2022, Columbia University gave her an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. That year she was also named an Officer of the French Legion of Honor, an award presented at the Night of Ideas celebration in Brooklyn by the French ambassador, Philippe Étienne. In 2023, she was nominated for the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2024, she shared the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis medal with Yoko Ono and Sandra Bloodworth.

  In 2026, she received the Princess of Asturias Award in the category of Arts. She was also named the 2026 recipient of the Harold Washington Literary Award in Chicago, the city where she was born.

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