Patti Smith Biography Quotes 33 Report mistakes

Early life and formation
Patricia Lee Smith was born on December 30, 1946, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in South Jersey, where her family settled in Deptford Township. The eldest of several children, she was raised in a household that valued books, music, and faith, and she cultivated a fierce imaginative life that drew as much from the Bible and classic literature as from radio pop and early rock and roll. After high school she worked briefly in factory and service jobs before orienting herself toward art, poetry, and the stage, guided by a constellation of inspirations that included Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, Bob Dylan, and the Beats.

New York, poetry, and the theater
Smith moved to New York City in the late 1960s, arriving with little money and a consuming desire to write. There she forged a lifelong artistic bond with the young photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Sharing cramped rooms and later a residence at the Chelsea Hotel, they nurtured each other's ambitions while navigating the city's art, fashion, and literary scenes. Smith worked in bookstores, read at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, and began merging poetry with performance. A collaboration with playwright-actor Sam Shepard yielded the one-act play Cowboy Mouth in 1971, which announced her charisma as a performer who could fuse spoken word, drama, and song.

From poetry to a band
In 1971 Smith began presenting her poems with electric guitar accompaniment by Lenny Kaye, a rock historian and guitarist whose feel for proto-punk, girl groups, and psychedelia dovetailed with her own tastes. Their early single, Hey Joe backed with Piss Factory (1974), signaled a language-driven rock that was raw, literate, and ritualistic. The Patti Smith Group coalesced around Kaye, pianist Richard Sohl, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, and multi-instrumentalist Ivan Kral, with Tom Verlaine of Television occasionally contributing guitar lines. The group became a fixture at CBGB, part of a downtown milieu that also included Television, the Ramones, and Talking Heads, though Smith always kept a poet's distance from rigid labels.

Horses and the 1970s breakthrough
Smith's debut album, Horses (1975), produced by John Cale, took the incantatory power of her readings into rock's studio frame. Mapplethorpe's stark cover portrait helped enshrine the record as an aesthetic statement, while the music stretched from deconstructed rock standards to visionary originals. She followed with Radio Ethiopia (1976) and Easter (1978), the latter containing Because the Night, co-written with Bruce Springsteen, which brought her broader radio success without diluting her intensity. A serious fall from a stage in Florida in early 1977 left her with neck injuries; rehabilitation steered her into disciplined vocal and physical practice and reinforced her appetite for writing. Wave (1979), produced by Todd Rundgren, closed the first chapter of the band's run.

Partnership and relative retreat
In 1980 Smith married Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5 and moved to the Detroit area. Their partnership anchored a period of relative withdrawal from public life as she focused on family and on a more private creative rhythm. The couple recorded Dream of Life (1988), which yielded the enduring anthem People Have the Power. She had long-standing friendships with musicians such as Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult, to whom she contributed lyrics earlier in the decade, and she remained connected to poets and photographers as she continued to write and draw.

Loss, return, and renewed voice
The 1990s brought profound losses: Richard Sohl died in 1990, and in 1994 both Fred Smith and her brother Todd died. Out of grief she returned to the stage and studio with a steadied resolve. Gone Again (1996) confronted mourning with clarity and included About a Boy, written in memory of Kurt Cobain. She collaborated with Michael Stipe on R.E.M.'s E-Bow the Letter that same year, a marker of her influence across generations. Peace and Noise (1997) and Gung Ho (2000) deepened her engagement with politics and history, supported by longtime colleagues Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty and later by bassist Tony Shanahan. Trampin' (2004) affirmed a spare, devotional approach, while Twelve (2007) revisited the rock canon through interpretive covers, and Banga (2012) braided travel, literature, and memory.

Writer, artist, and public figure
Parallel to her music, Smith has published volumes of poetry and prose and exhibited drawings and photographs, often using humble materials and Polaroids to honor talismans of artistic lineage. Just Kids (2010), a memoir of her bond with Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award and became a modern classic of artistic coming-of-age. She followed with M Train (2015) and Year of the Monkey (2019), meditative works that map the rituals of reading, travel, and daily life. Her public readings, like her concerts, retain the feel of invocation and conversation, attentive to the audience and to the ghosts of mentors such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

Recognition and later activities
Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, a salute to the breadth of her influence on punk, alternative rock, and performance poetry. France named her a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and she received the Polar Music Prize in 2011. In 2016 she honored Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize by performing A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall at the Stockholm ceremony, a moment of vulnerability and grace that underscored her standing as a cultural emissary. She has appeared at events ranging from the Vatican's Christmas concert to human-rights benefits, aligning her art with environmental, antiwar, and literacy causes.

Family, collaborators, and legacy
Smith is the mother of Jackson and Jesse, and her work often circles themes of kinship, stewardship, and remembrance. On stage, the chemistry with Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty suggests the longevity of a band that grew up inside her poems. Off stage, friendships with figures like Tom Verlaine, Sam Shepard, and Bruce Springsteen trace a web of mutual influence that spans theater, literature, and rock and roll. The Patti Smith Group's original core, including Ivan Kral and Richard Sohl, left a template for bands that value narrative, improvisation, and the intimate charge of small rooms.

Enduring impact
Often called the godmother of punk, Smith opened a pathway where a poet could command a rock band and where a rock singer could read a poem to a pin-drop hush. Horses remains a rite of passage for listeners discovering the reach of language inside amplified music, while Just Kids has become an intergenerational handbook for artists making their way in a city of impossible rents and improbable miracles. Whether singing in a club, reading in a library, or standing at a global ceremony with a song by Dylan on her lips, Patti Smith has persistently fused art and life, turning witness into work and work into an ethic of care that continues to animate audiences around the world.

Our collection contains 33 quotes who is written by Patti, under the main topics: Motivational - Wisdom - Justice - Art - Music.

Other people realated to Patti: Wayne Kramer (Writer), Lester Bangs (Critic), Michael Stipe (Musician), Debbie Harry (Musician), James Wolcott (Critic), Richard Hell (Musician), William Burroughs (Writer), Clive Davis (Businessman)