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Chicago, United States (1946 – present)

Patricia Lee “Patti” Smith (born December 30, 1946 in Chicago) is an American singer–songwriter, poet and visual artist who was a highly influential component of the New York rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the “Godmother of Punk”, she integrated the beat performance style with three-chord rock. Smith’s most widely known song is PlayBecause the Night, which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Smith was born in Chicago. Her mother, Beverly, was a jazz singer, and father, Grant, worked at the Honeywell plant. She spent her entire childhood in Deptford, New Jersey. Raised the daughter of a Jehovah’s Witness mother, she claims she had a strong religious education and a very good Bible education, but left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining and much later wrote the opening line of her cover version of Them’s “Gloria” in response to this experience. Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964. The family was not wealthy and Smith went to work in a factory.

In 1967 she left Glassboro State Teachers College (now Rowan University) and moved to New York City. She met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe there while working at a book store with friend, poet Janet Hamill. Mapplethorpe’s photographs of her became the covers for the Patti Smith Group LPs, and they remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and started busking and doing performance art.
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