When I was growing up, I assumed the term referred to the non-linear (J-shaped) path one might take when crossing the street illegally. Not so, as explained at World Wide Worlds:
From around the last quarter of the nineteenth century, jay had been a slang term in North America for a stupid, gullible, ignorant, or provincial person, a rustic, bumpkin or simpleton. I would guess it refers to the noisy chattering of these conversational birds. The jay that I sometimes see on country walks, the European species, belongs in the genus Garrulus and garrulous is just the right word for it — jay was an insulting term for a foolish chattering person back in the 1500s. It’s not hard to see how country cousins, unversed to city ways, could have had this well-established sobriquet attached to them by supercilious metropolitans.
Apparently in the early 20th century the term "jay driver" was similarly used:
Ogden Standard, Utah, 18 April 1906. Other newspaper examples from the same period suggest that the prime characteristic of a jay driver was that he wandered about all over the road, causing confusion among other drivers. It was explained in the Emporia Gazette of Kansas on 13 July 1911: “A jay driver is a species of the human race who, when driving either a horse or an automobile, or riding a bicycle on the streets, does not observe the rules of the road. It is the custom of the jay driver to drive on the wrong side of the street.”
I presume
John Walkenbach knows all about this...
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