Red Clay Strays explain the Dolly Parton line in their song Stone's Throw

Red Clay Strays put Dolly Parton's name in a song, and it turns out they were not talking about the singer at all. The reference in "Stone's Throw" points at a bridge: the General W.K. Wilson Jr. Bridge, known locally as the Dolly Parton Bridge, which carries I-65 South just before Mobile, Alabama.

For a band from Mobile that spends most of the year touring, that bridge is a landmark with a specific job. "We'd be out on the road for months at a time. Tired and ready to get home. Counting miles," the band explained. When they reached the bridge, they knew they were almost there.

That is the whole meaning of the name-drop, and it is a smaller and better one than a tribute would have been. The line is not about country music royalty; it is about the last stretch of a drive, and the moment a van full of exhausted musicians works out it is nearly finished.

The bridge earns its nickname from its shape rather than any connection to the singer, and it has been part of Gulf Coast road vocabulary for years. The band's decision to use the local name rather than the official one is what put Parton in the lyric in the first place.

Since Parton's death on August 25 at the age of 80, the line has changed on them. A song about the relief of coming home now carries a reference to someone who is gone, which is the sort of thing that happens to lyrics without anybody rewriting them. The band's own framing is that her name meant something personal to them before it meant anything commemorative.

Red Clay Strays sit in the same country and rock territory as several other acts who spent the last week of August reworking their sets around Parton. Brandi Carlile built an encore around her in Nashville and Kacey Musgraves dedicated Rainbow to her in Boston. The Strays did not have to add anything. The reference was already there.