What's the first appearance of the rhyme about "He died defending his right of way"?

Question

There's a little poem that goes something like this:

Here lies the body of Thomas Grey,
Who died defending his right of way.
He was perfectly right as he sped along,
But he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong".

Looking up this poem reveals many versions, with any number of variations on the name of the dead man (Edward Gray, Mike O'Day, and even Captain May who sailed along) and sometimes variations on the rest, too. For instance, "He was right, dead right, the whole way along", and "John's light was green, the other red, John was right but now he's dead".

Where's the earliest version of this that can be found, what was it then, and is it known who wrote it?

Answer 1

The poem is ‘An Epitaph’ by Edgar A. Guest, first published in the Detroit Free Press on 1st October 1916 in Guest’s ‘Breakfast Table Chat’ column.

An Epitaph.

Here lies the body
    Of William Jay,
Who died maintaining
    His right of way.
He was in the right
    As he sped along,
But he’s just as dead
    As if he’d been wrong.

_{Edgar A. Guest (1916). ‘An Epitaph’. In the Detroit Free Press, 1 October 1916, p. 72. Detroit, Michigan.}

Edgar A. Guest was a popular writer of light verse who worked at the Detroit Free Press. He was extraordinarily prolific—Wikipedia credits him with “some 11,000 poems”—and his verse was widely syndicated in American newspapers.

I found this by entering phrases from the poem into the Elephind newspaper search engine. This turned up an early appearance in the Clare Sentinel, 16 November 1916, p. 4, where the poem was credited to Guest. Reading Guest’s biography at Wikipedia, it seemed likely that the poem had first appeared in his column at the Detroit Free Press, and this was easy to verify using the paper’s searchable archives.

Answer 2

If you look at Google books, it finds several instances of this rhyme labeled 1917, 1918, and 1919, and a few from earlier years. Looking at these more carefully, the earlier hits are all mislabeled, and the hits labeled 1917 are in bound volumes of periodicals that extend over several years, so they actually appeared in 1918 or later. Here is the earliest one I found, from May 1918, in the periodical The National Underwriter. Gareth Rees, found one slightly earlier, in the Bowser Business Boomer 16:11 (December 1917), page 138.

The early ones all have nearly identical wording, which goes as follows:

Here lies the body of William Jay,
who died maintaining his right of way.
He was right as he sped along—
but he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong.

One of the early versions credits the poem to the Boston Transcript. If somebody has access to the Boston Transcript archives, it would be worth checking to see whether their version was earlier.