FAMILY TREE She’s spent her teen years in Tennessee, but as a child she lived on a Christmas-tree farm in Wyomissing, Pa., with her stockbroker dad and homemaker mom. Hauling the harvest around took muscle, but one icky task required a strong stomach. “I had to look for praying mantis eggs [in the trees],” she says, “because if people brought them into their house, the eggs would hatch, and there’d be thousands of them.”
QUADRUPLE THREAT? Sure, she sings, plays guitar and wrote much of her self-titled gold debut. But at age 10, Swift was her own agent too, booking karaoke contests and festival gigs. The next year she took her demo of Dolly Parton and Chicks covers to Nashville. “I walked into the major labels and was like, ‘I…
