Songfacts®:

• This song is about Fred "Sonic" Smith, guitarist in the band MC5. He was Patti Smith's boyfriend at the time, and in 1980, they got married. The song is love letter to Fred, using the more poetic and singable version of his name: Frederick.
  
  Patti and Fred remained married until 1994, when he died of heart failure (Fred's obituaries reported his age as 44, but he may have been a year or two older). They had two children together: son Jackson and daughter Jesse.
• Patti Smith was one of the most influential and revered singer-songwriters of the '70s, but she had trouble breaking through to a wider audience. In 1978 she landed her biggest hit by reworking a song written by Bruce Springsteen, "Because The Night." She structured "Frederick" in a similar style to give the song pop appeal, which worked to some extent - it reached #90 in the US to become her only chart entry other than "Because The Night." She faced criticism for cloning her hit, but was unapologetic.
  
  "One of the things I tried to do on this record [Wave] was write a little song that everyone would love, that people would like to hear while they were ironing, or fathers would like to listen to on the way to work, or kids would like dancin' to," she told New York Rocker. "That's one of the pressures I put upon myself, to write a song like that. And that's 'Frederick.' It's not a pressure, it's a goal."
• The song is part of Smith's fourth album, Wave. It was released as the first single, followed by "Dancing Barefoot," which didn't chart but gained appreciation over time. In 1980, the year after the album was issued, Patti married Sonic Smith and moved to Detroit, where she took a long hiatus and raised their kids. She didn't put out another album until 1988 when she returned with Dream Of Life. She was working on another album when Fred died; she scrapped that one and, after opening some shows for Bob Dylan in 1995, released Gone Again in 1996, an album that pays tribute not only to Fred but also to her brother Todd, who died of a stroke just weeks after Patti lost her husband.
• It's surprising that this song didn't become a much bigger hit. All the ingredients were there: Smith had refined her sound and gotten on the radio a year earlier with "Because The Night"; it was released on Arista Records and given plenty of promotion by its leader, Clive Davis; and, it was produced by Todd Rundgren, who helmed Meat Loaf's 1977 masterstroke Bat Out Of Hell, which went 14x Platinum.
  
  The chart failure irked Smith but didn't hurt her legacy. She was a no-brainer selection for the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and often cited as a model of daring artistic integrity.