In December 2006, Taylor Swift spent around three hours serenading a crowd of about 45 people at Jeff Jarrett’s home in Tennessee. In a recent interview with TMZ Sports, WWE Hall of Famer recalled the “amazing experience” where the singer-songwriter, who had recently released her self-titled debut featuring “Tim McGraw,” hosted an impromptu private concert for his family a few months before his wife died.
“It was Christmas of 2006. My first wife [Jill Gregory] was really ill with breast cancer. She passed away about five months after this, so she was really ill,” Jarrett said. Swift was a family friend who often babysat their young daughters. They were the ones who set the show in motion. “The girls wanted her to sing and play,” he continued, noting that Swift had to “actually run back home” to grab her guitar.
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“She kind of bonded with the family, specifically with the girls,” Jarrett said. Swift continued to show up for the family after Gregory died. “What a very cool relationship that developed. When my wife passed away, Taylor would come around, and was really good with the girls.”
Jarrett keeps in touch with Swift’s father, Scott Swift, and is rooting for Swift and her fiancé, Travis Kelce. “It’s very cool to see this side of Taylor,” he said. “She’s early 30s, and I can just see little kids running around when Scott and Andrea have grand babies. It’s really cool to see the evolution of her not of her professional career, but her personal life.”
Swift and Kelce announced their engagement on Aug. 26. “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” they wrote in a shared Instagram post. During an appearance on his New Heights podcast, the musician said that their love story “is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.”
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