Bruce Springsteen‘s longtime manager has officially ended a long-running debate over the rocker’s “Thunder Road” lyrics.

For nearly 50 years, Springsteen’s fans have been debating whether Mary’s dress “waves” or “sways” in opening part of “Thunder Road.” The lyrics included with the original 1975 vinyl pressing and those posted on the artist’s website read Mary’s dress waves.

The debate, however, was reignited a couple of weeks ago, when New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman tweeted, “A screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways,” with a picture of the empty stage before a “Springsteen on Broadway” performance. This restarted the debate with several people correcting her the lyric is “waves,” not “sways.”

However, Jon Landau, longtime Springsteen collaborator and manager as well as co-producer of Born to Run, settled the issue in an email to the New Yorker‘s David Remnick.

“The word is ‘sways,’” Landau wrote. “That’s the way he wrote it in his original notebooks, that’s the way he sang it on ‘Born to Run,’ in 1975, that’s the way he has always sung it at thousands of shows, and that’s the way he sings it right now on Broadway. Any typos in official Bruce material will be corrected. And, by the way, ‘dresses’ do not know how to ‘wave.’”

According to Variety, the official Springsteen site was updated with lyrics now reading “sways” instead of the earlier “waves.”

(Photo: Danny Clinch)

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