.

Taylor Swift Taking Ailing Teen to ACM Awards

18-year-old with leukemia asked country star to his prom

Comment
Taylor Swift with her fans at the 46th Annual Academy Of Country Music Awards.
Christopher Polk/ACMA2011/Getty Images for ACM
By Rolling Stone
February 28, 2012 8:40 AM ET

Taylor Swift will be taking a fan with leukemia as her date to the Academy of Country Music Awards on April 1st in Las Vegas.

Kevin McGuire, an 18-year-old from Somerdale, New Jersey, had started a Facebook campaign with his sister to get the country pop star to be his prom date. After this caught Swift's attention, she wrote to tell him that she couldn't make his prom, but she invited him to accompany her to the awards show, where she is up for three honors.

Swift is following the lead of Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, who accepted similar requests for dates last year from military cadets. In a post on her blog in November, Timberlake said that attending the Marine Corps Ball on his date with Corporal Kelsey De Santis changed his life.

Related

|

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

prev
Radiohead Debut Two New Songs in Miami
Music Main Next
Toto Sues Sony Over Unpaid Royalties

blog comments powered by Disqus
Stay Connected

Sign up to get Rolling Stone's daily newsletter.

Most Popular

Photos & Videos

Go To Content

Random Notes: Hottest Rock Pictures

Go To Content Play Video

Video: Bobby Womack Teases Upcoming Album

Go To Content

Gallery: On the Scene at the 2012 'American Idol' Finale

Best Ever Lists
100 Best Albums of the 2000s

Other Lists

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »