The Story of an Ordinary Girl With a Guitar That Got Millions of Fans and Stayed True to Herself

The story of Taylor Swift is like a fairy tale. It’s hard to imagine how a shy girl from a small town managed to become a show business star, singing country songs, and being one of the highest-paid and most successful musicians in the world.

We at CHEERY want to look back and remember first Taylor’s steps on the path to the big stage and becoming a worldwide-known star.

If the family hadn’t moved very often, she would have been working in advertising now.

• Taylor Swift was born in 1989, a short time before Christmas, in a small town of West Reading. Later, her father bought a Christmas tree farm, and the whole family moved there. You can learn more about this period of her life from her video Christmas Tree Farm, where she uses archive family videos.
• Several years later, the family rented a house in the suburban town of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, and then went to Nashville, and then into a house near the lake in Hendersonville. The fact that Swift’s parents were always ready to move made a big impact on the opportunity to build a music career. But the singer thinks she would do something in the advertisement if she had stayed in her hometown.

• It’s hard to say that Taylor was lucky. In fact, it was vice versa: she owes a lot of the failures she had to deal with at the beginning of her path. Even since she was a child, she took part in theater plays and went to acting classes, dreaming about performing on the Broadway stage. But when she came to the audition in New York, she didn’t get any roles.

• At the same time, she got interested in music. Maybe, it was hereditary: her grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, was an opera singer. You can see her in the photos and videos from the family archives that were used in Taylor’s video “Marjorie”. Looking at her grandmother, Taylor was growing up, dreaming about the big stage.
• The name Taylor is also connected with music. Her parents named the future singer after James Taylor. So, it’s a gender-neutral name, and you don’t know the gender of the person before you meet them. It would be quite useful if Taylor decided to build a career in the corporate world.

Why she chose country if she could become a pop princess?

• The first song Taylor learned to play on the guitar was the hit “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer. Today, she can play the piano, ukulele, electric guitar, and banjo.
• But why did she choose country music? In the 20th century, country wasn’t popular among the mass audience in the US. But everything changed in the 80s when the film Urban Cowboy was released. It made country just as popular as disco, and new generations of musicians appeared in the US, who wanted to experiment by mixing different genres to attract different audiences.
• Taylor Swift, being a country fan, also combined it with pop at the beginning, trying to reach the US audience. So, her first album was certified seven times Platinum in the US and was 18th on US Billboard 200 as the most played album, from 1963 to 2017.

• Thanks to Swift, country music became popular outside the US. Today, the singer works in different genres. She is the Artist of the Decade, according to American Music Awards, and Woman of the Decade, according to Billboard. She’s the winner of hundreds of awards, including the most award-winning country album “Fearless”, and the most award-winning pop album “1989” in the history of music.
• Taylor Swift is the only woman in history that won a Grammy for Best Album 3 times. Her net worth is estimated at $570 million, and she is one of the highest-paid celebrities. She does active charity work, taking part not only in big events but also helping strangers that are in difficult situations.

• Despite being popular, Taylor Swift has the image of a cute girl next door everyone wants to be friends. She often jokes at herself, is not afraid of awkward situations, and doesn’t act like a moody star.
• In her early songs, she presented herself as an ordinary teenager, who is not popular among others, but trying to stay true to herself. She means that she went through the same things millions of other people did.
• It’s interesting to watch Taylor Swift not only on the stage but also in regular life. It’s hard to criticize her for anything, on the contrary, she’s a great role model.

Why she’s even cooler than we thought.

• Taylor Swift writes music for other singers under the name of Nils Sjöberg. She’s the author of the single “This Is What You Came For” for Calvin Harris (who she was dating at the time), and the songs “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home”, and “Crazier” you can hear in Hannah Montana: The Movie, where the singer had a small role in an episode.
• She often works with the cinema world. One of her first appearances on the screen was in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. She also took part in Valentine’s Day and The Giver, voiced a character in The Lorax, was in the musical Cats, and wrote a soundtrack for it — “Beautiful Ghosts”.
• Taylor tries herself as a director. She’s recently released a short film All Too Well, where you can see Sadie Sink, the star of Stranger Things. By the way, the video is based on the relationship story of Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal.

• Taylor is a bad cat lover. She lives with 2 cats: one of them is Olivia Benson in honor of Mariska Hargitay’s Law & Order: SVU character, and the other one is Meredith after Grey’s Anatomy. A short time age, she picked up a kitten from a shelter, and named him Benjamin Button.
• After her concerts, when she wants to relax and rest, she loves rewatching her favorite series Friends.

• Taylor is not superstitious. She was born on December 13th, and she loves everything that has to do with this number. She sometimes draws 13 on her arm before the concert. Her fans regularly see this number that she hides in her works. For example, in her video “...Ready for it”, 13 appears on the wall, and in the album Red, the song “The Lucky One” is number 13.

• Taylor loves surprising her fans and even spies on them on social media to guess what they want. For example, she can make a party for them at her place, send someone gifts, and even invite them to celebrate a birthday together.
• The singer is happy to get unexpected gifts and surprises. This is what her colleagues prepared for her in 2012 when her single became a huge hit:

• Taylor is friends with many celebrities. Examples, Selena Gomez, Gigi Hadid, Blake Lively, Emma Stone, Martha Hunt, Abigail Anderson, and many others. You can see some of them in her videos (for example, in “Bad Blood”).

• In a way, Ed Sheeran owes his success to her. In 2012, Taylor was in a concert in Australia, where she introduced a line from the song of the rising star of Britain to her fans. She said he was one of the singers she admires, along with U2, Sister Hazel, and Selena Gomez. Ed suggested that they met in person. They became friends, started recording songs together, and even performed together, which gave Ed’s career a huge boost.

• Taylor is not the only child, she has a younger brother, Austin. He is a beginner actor that does photography in his free time, and sometimes shows the singer’s fans her new photos.
• During one of the interviews on the verge of Taylor’s 30th birthday, a German reporter asked her a tactless question about her plans on having children. Taylor responded accordingly:

• Right now, the singer is not officially married, but since 2016, she’s been dating English actor Joe Alwyn that has been a co-producer of her songs, and even a songwriter under the name of William Bowery. Taylor believes that thanks to his support, she started showing interest in social and political life, which impacts her recent work and public life.
• In 2015, Taylor made Apple change the terms of Apple Music for musicians. When Apple was launching their platform, they offered users 3 months of free subscription and didn’t pay anything to the musicians. Taylor said that her new album “1989” wouldn’t be available on Apple Music. So, Apple agreed with her and paid the musicians for the streaming.

• In 2017, when the #MeToo movement started in the US, Taylor got $1 compensation from a man who sexually harassed the singer. And when she complained, and he was fired, he accused her of defamation. But Taylor managed to win the legal case against him.
• There’s an opinion that Swift referred to that case in the video “Look What You Made Me Do”, where in a bathtub of diamonds, there is a 1-dollar bill. But the singer never confirmed this theory.

• In 2019, Taylor said she was going to re-record her back catalog, to control the recordings of her songs. So, she got full control of her earnings from using her old (re-recorded) songs.

• The video “You Need to Calm Down” was her support for the LGBTQ+ community. The video featured Ellen DeGeneres, Billy Porter and RuPaul, singer Katy Perry, and actor Ryan Reynolds. Numerous drag queens also appeared there.
• In the final seconds of the video, there’s a calling to sign a petition where Taylor Swift asks to legally protect LGBTQ people from discrimination.

• Taylor Swift became a feminist icon, proving that a girl from a small town, who is not afraid of sharing her personal stories with the world, can become one of the most influential figures in the music industry where power belonged only to men for a long time.
• She is an example of a female singer, who can influence social and political life, protect her rights in the face of difficulties, and find the power to keep going even when there are crowds of haters. She’s not perfect, but she wants to be better, and she shows other people what great results a correction of mistakes can lead to.

What do you think about Taylor Swift and her work?