In 1979, Patti Smith was riding the wave of her most commercially successful album, Easter, when she released a song that would become one of her signature anthems.
Written by Smith and Ivan Kral for the Patti Smith Group album Wave, “Dancing Barefoot” was a dreamlike, mesmerizing song about love and spiritual connection. It featured a spoken word at the end—not an uncommon move for the poet/songwriter known as the “Godmother of Punk.”
And while the song was dedicated to female French painter Jeanne Hebuterne, Smith wrote “Dancing Barefoot” with a man’s voice in mind.
In a post on her website, Smith recalled that she wrote the lyrics to “Dancing Barefoot” in 1978 after Kral recorded song ideas on a cassette tape and gave them to her.
“The music that became ‘Dancing Barefoot’ was from an acoustic guitar riff that he wrote and that we developed as a band,” Smith revealed.
Smith also revealed that she wrote the lyrics to the song with late Doors legend Jim Morrison in mind.
“I had the concept to write a lyric line that would have several levels – the love of one human being for another and the love of one’s creator. So in a sense, the song addresses both physical and spiritual love,” she shared. “Truthfully, I always imagined Jim Morrison singing it, which resulted in me singing and recording it in a lower vocal register. I wanted the verse to have a masculine appeal and the chorus to have a feminine one.”
Like Morrison, who died in 1971, Smith often merged poetry with rock and roll. She once told NPR that while she hadn’t planned to become a rock singer, she recorded music as a way to “reach out to other disenfranchised people.”
“And also in terms of our place in rock ‘n’ roll, just to create some bridge between our great artists that we had just lost – Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison among them – and to create space for what I felt would be the new guard, which I didn’t really include myself,” she added.
While “Dancing Barefoot” became a hit in Europe, Smith noted that in 1979 “it was considered too provocative for American radio.”
One of the reasons was the use of the word “heroine” in the chorus, which Smith wrote as the feminine form of “hero.” Record label executives thought “heroine” referred to the drug heroin and asked her to change the lyric, but Smith refused.
“The use of the word ‘heroine,’ which of course is used in the context of the song as the feminine of HERO, was objected to,” Smith explained on her website. “It was suggested that I change the word ‘heroine’ and consult the thesaurus for a suitable replacement. I am happy with my decision to let it stand as written.”
Smith clarified the word’s meaning in the liner notes to Wave. According to American Songwriter, she wrote, “Dedicated to the rites of the heroine!”
Smith has stated that while she experimented, she couldn’t relate to the rampant rock drug culture of the 1970s.
“The main aspect of my experimentation was in art,” she told Cream magazine in an interview. “I wrote about things within art, but in terms of myself, I’ve always had a very different view of drugs that my generation did. I did not believe that drugs were for recreational use. I believed drugs were sacred. And I didn’t relate to the drug culture. I knew so many people that took them, and they looked like babbling idiots.”
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