Taylor Swift on George Strait starts with a backstage meeting and ends with a quote that still does the work. At the 2008 CMA Awards in Nashville, she said he had an “awesome, dry, subtle sense of humour,” after talking to him before presenting the Best New Artist award.
“While I was backstage before presenting the Best New Artist award, I talked to George Strait for a while. He’s so incredibly cool. So down-to-earth and funny,” she wrote on MySpace. She added, “I think it should be known that George Strait has an awesome, dry, subtle sense of humour.”
George Strait and 2007
The timing matters because Swift was not meeting him as a stranger. In 2007, she opened for George Strait on a number of dates on his North America tour, so the 2008 exchange reads less like a first impression and more like a return to a working relationship already in place.
That matters in country music, where access and credibility often come from the road as much as from the stage. Swift was already moving toward pop dominance, but the source makes plain that she still framed herself through country music and its hierarchy, not as someone detached from it.
Shania Twain and MySpace
She used the same MySpace post to describe meeting Shania Twain as “AWESOME.” Swift wrote that Twain walked up, introduced herself, and said she wanted to meet her and tell her she was doing a great job. Swift said she cried after realizing she did not have her camera.
“But the real moment that brought on this wave of gratitude was when Shania Twain HERSELF walked up and introduced herself to me,” Swift wrote. She then tied the night back to the genre itself: “Country music is the place to find reality in music, and reality in the stars who make that music.”
Country pride in 2008
Swift’s post also explains why the backstage exchange still travels well: it captures a performer who was already becoming one of the biggest pop artists around while insisting her country roots still mattered. She wrote that she was proud to sing country music, and that “has never wavered.”
For readers, the practical takeaway is simple. The line that keeps circulating is not a polished interview answer but a MySpace post from 2008, built around a backstage conversation, a Best New Artist presentation, and a very specific read on Strait’s humor. What she did not spell out was the exact joke or line that made her describe him that way, which leaves the quote sharp and the moment unfinished.
