Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. Songs or stories from a tradition must be stored in one person's memory and passed to another person who can also remember and retell them. This process must occur over many generations. For example, verses from versions of ballads collected in the 1600s in Great Britain are similar to versions collected since the 1980s in North Carolina. Most of the words have changed, but the basic ideas and poetic structures have not. Similarly, the counting-out rhyme "Eenie meenie" has remained stable, though with much less change, for since the end of the nineteenth century. Rote memorization is not occurring. Rather there is evidence that poetic and meaning rules are being transmitted. Oral traditions must, therefore, have forms of organization and modes of transmission to decrease the changes that human memory usually imposes on verbal material (Rubin, 1995).

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