Songfacts®:

• Kimberly is Patti Smith's youngest sister by 12 years. This tender confessional from Patti's debut album, Horses, recounts Kimberly's birth.
  
  "Housing developments were a new thing, postwar, they'd build them for poor people in areas that nobody wanted," Smith recalled to The Observer. "Ours was literally on a swamp. We lived across the street from an old abandoned barn that got hit by lightning shortly after Kimberly was born. I went outside and I was holding her, watching this barn in flames. Hundreds of bats lived in it, and you could hear them screeching, and see bats and owls and buzzards flying out."
• Kimberly Smith became a guitarist/songwriter. She got some of her first stage experience playing acoustic guitar on this song when Patti toured Horses in the late '70s.
• Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles sang this at a 2025 Carnegie Hall tribute concert for Patti Smith. "The night was buzzing with love - love for Patti Smith who changed the course my life with her music, her poetry, her artistry, her humanity - and inspired me and countless others to follow their dreams," Hoffs posted. "It was an honor and a joy to sing Kimberly, a song about her adored baby sister on that iconic stage, in that glorious venue."
  
  The house band that night included Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Benmont Tench from Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. Among the other performers: Michael Stipe, Bruce Springsteen, Maggie Rogers and Scarlett Johansson.
• According to Patti Smith's guitarist Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl's organ playing on "Kimberley" was inspired by the Booker T. and the MGs song "Green Onions."