Stewart, Cal -- Uncle Josh Weathersby’s “Punkin’ Centre” Stories, Epigraph (1903)

Dave — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:46:07 +0000

I don’t believe in kickin’,
It aint apt to bring one peace;
But the wheel what squeaks the loudest
is the one what gets the grease.

Cal Stewart (1856-1919) American vaudevillian, monologuist [stage character "Uncle Josh" Weathersby]
Uncle Josh Weathersby’s “Punkin’ Centre” Stories, Epigraph (1903)
(Source)

Likely origin of the phrase, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." "Kicking" was period slang for complaining (only surviving to the present in a phrase like "You've got no kick coming").

The phrase is sometimes attributed to Josh Billings, in a similar poem dated around 1870 called "The Kicker":

I hate to be a kicker,
I always long for peace,
But the wheel that does the squeaking,
Is the one that gets the grease.

However, this poem has not actually been verified to exist. The unfounded attribution was included in the 1937 Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (11th Ed.), and has remained popular since.

The (likely) misattribution to the more well-known Billings may be a confusion between the names and folksy talking of both of the fictional characters "Josh Billings" and "Josh Weathersby."

For more discussion, see:

Quote Origin: The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease – Quote Investigator®.
Doyle, Mieder, Shapiro (eds.), The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012).

Note: this epigraph does not appear in the Project Gutenberg copy of this work.

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Stewart, Cal -- Uncle Josh Weathersby’s “Punkin’ Centre” Stories, Epigraph (1903)