A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss

This proverb now has two meanings: people pay a price for being always on the move, in that they have no roots in a specific place (the original meaning); or people who keep moving avoid picking up responsibilities and cares.

The proverb a rolling stone gathers no moss is often credited to the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus, and roughly translates as
People always moving, with no roots in one place, avoid responsibilities and cares.

The saying may not be authentic to Syrus; the Latin form usually given, Saxum volutum non obducitur musco, does not appear in the edited texts of Publilius Syrus, but it does appear in the Adagia of Erasmus.[1] The conventional English translation appeared in John Heywood's collection of Proverbs in 1546. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable also credits Erasmus, and relates it to other Latin proverbs, Planta quae saepius transfertus non coalescit, or Saepius plantata arbor fructum profert exiguum, both of which mean that a frequently replanted tree or plant yields little fruit.[2] It appears that the original intent of the proverb saw the growth of moss as desirable, and that the intent was to condemn mobility as unprofitable. The contemporary interpretation has turned the traditional understanding on its head.

Erasmus's proverb gave the name "rolling stone" to people who meet this description. This allusion has taken root in blues and rock and roll music. The blues musician Muddy Waters wrote a 1948 song called Rollin' Stone, which contains the lyrics:
I got a boy child's comin,He's gonna be, he's gonna be a rollin stone. . . [3][4]
From this reference, Brian Jones called the band he founded with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards "The Rolling Stones". Bob Dylan's 1965 song "Like A Rolling Stone", which appeared on his album Highway 61 Revisited, may refer to the original proverb. From these references, Jann Wenner and Ralph J. Gleason founded the magazine Rolling Stone. The song "One of Us" compares God to a "Holy Rolling Stone".

Mosses need a stable, moist environment to grow (shady edges of your lawn, edges of old roofs, immobile old stones set in the ground. If a stone is rolling, it does not provide this environment. Such a stone remains free, "clean," unadorned. So, by metaphor, a "rolling stone" is an unattached, itinerant person. The blues singer Muddy Waters wrote and sang a song in which he said "I'm a rollin' stone" and that's where the rock group the Rolling Stones got their name, also where the pop-culture newspaper got its name.