'Happy birthday to writer and rock star Patricia Lee “Patti” Smith, born Chicago, Ill. 70 years ago today. Her family moved to Philadelphia and eventually New Jersey, where she was raised. Her mother was a devout Jehovah’s Witness which informed Patti’s religious views, both pro- and anti-.'
She spent her early childhood in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia,[11]before her family moved to Pitman, New Jersey[12] and later to The Woodbury Gardens section of Deptford Township, New Jersey.[13][14] Her mother was a Jehovah's Witness. Patti had a strong religious upbringing and a Bible education, but left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining; much later, she wrote the line "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" in her cover version of Them's "Gloria" in response to this experience.[15] She has described having an avid interest in Tibetan Buddhism around the age of eleven or twelve, saying "I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer," but that as an adult she sees clear parallels between different forms of religion, and has come to the conclusion that religious dogmas are "... man-made laws that you can either decide to abide by or not."[16]
Smith's family moved to Philadelphia in 1950 and then to Woodbury, New Jersey, in 1956, when she was 9 years old.
A tall, gangly and sickly child with a lazy left eye, Smith's outward appearance and shy demeanor gave no hint of the groundbreaking rock star she would become. However, Smith says she always knew that she was destined for greatness. "When I was a little kid, I always knew that I had some special kind of thing inside me," she remembered. "I mean, I wasn't attractive, I wasn't very verbal, I wasn't very smart in school. I wasn't anything that showed the world I was something special, but I had this tremendous hope all the time. I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going... I was a happy child, because I had this feeling that I was going to go beyond my body physical... I just knew it."