American poet, songwriter, performer, and memoirist whose 1975 album Horses — opening with the line "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," delivered over a vamp on Van Morrison's "Gloria" — is conventionally identified as the founding document of New York punk rock and is, more durably, the moment at which the line between the Beat-Symbolist poetic tradition and rock-and-roll performance was decisively closed. Smith was born in 1946 in Chicago and raised in South Jersey in a working-class Jehovah's Witness family, moved to New York in 1967 with no money and no plan, met Robert Mapplethorpe within days of arriving, and spent the next decade in the milieu of the Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, and CBGB — a milieu she has documented in two of the major American memoirs of the last twenty-five years.
The poetic genealogy is explicit and was already explicit in 1971, when Smith began doing readings at St. Mark's Church accompanied by Lenny Kaye on guitar: Rimbaud above all (whose grave at Charleville she made a pilgrimage to), Ginsberg and the Beats, Blake, the Symbolists, Woolf, the French and Russian moderns. The argument the readings, and then Horses, were making was that rock-and-roll could carry this material — that the three-minute song, in the right hands, was a continuation of the visionary lyric tradition rather than its decadence. The argument has been won so completely that it is hard to remember it ever needed making.
The first run of albums (Horses, 1975; Radio Ethiopia, 1976; Easter, 1978; Wave, 1979) ended when Smith married Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5, moved to suburban Detroit, and stopped recording for sixteen years to raise their two children. Fred Smith died in 1994, her brother Todd a month later, and Mapplethorpe had died of AIDS in 1989; the music she came back to make in the second half of her career — Gone Again (1996), Peace and Noise (1997), Trampin' (2004), Banga (2012) — is the work of an elegist. Just Kids (2010), her memoir of the late-1960s and 1970s relationship with Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award and brought her a much larger readership; M Train (2015) and Year of the Monkey (2019) extended the project. She has been a sustained public defender of free speech, of the visionary tradition in American letters, and (against the grain of much of her milieu) of the dignity of family life and ordinary domestic devotion.