Patti Smith is often confused with Patty Smyth - the former lead singer of the band Scandal.
Patti Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American musician, singer, and poet. She came to prominence during the punk movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called "punk rock's poet laureate", she brought a feminist and intellectual take to punk music and became one of rock and roll's most influential female musicians.
She was born Patti Lee Smith in Chicago, Illinois and raised in New Jersey. Her father was an atheist and her mother was a devout Jehovah's Witness. The family was not wealthy and, her formal education over at 16, Smith went to work in a factory – an experience she found excruciating. She also bore a child whom she gave up for adoption. In 1969 she left New Jersey for good.
When Smith first arrived in New York City, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe. The two were lovers for a time, in spite of Mapplethorpe's homosexuality, and they remained close friends until Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989. (Among Smith's other well-known lovers were poet Jim Carroll and Television member Tom Verlaine). She spent the early 1970s painting, writing, and performing spoken-word poetry—frequently at St. Mark's Poetry Project. In 1971 she performed – for one night only – in the play Cowboy Mouth, a collaboration with the playwright and actor Sam Shepard (the published play's notes call for "a man who looks like a coyote and a woman who looks like a crow").