Kimberly

Album: Horses (1975)
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Songfacts®:

  • Kimberly is Patti Smith's youngest sister by 12 years. This tender confessional from Patti's debut album, Horses, recounts the songstress' experience of her sibling'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.

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