Characteristically they take on modern elements, substituting the known for the unknown, and accommodating their personal names, and their localizations. One, The Farmer's Curst Wife, just mentioned, has drifted to Texas, and has taken to itself classification as a cowboy song. The Two Brothers, in a Nebraska version, seems well on the way toward becoming a Western song. I'm dead and lying in my grave, Way out in Idaho. Popular tradition dims the romantic elements.
Lords lose their nobility and become ordinary citizens.
Kings and princesses and ghosts are made over into the singer's own kind of people. The narrative loses its reflection of the original surroundings, and assumes altered character. And, in both imported and indigenous pieces, serious events or sentiments are often vulgarized or made commonplace, till the originally earnest survives only in farce. The general trend is toward degradation, not improvement, by the process of oral preservation and transmission. This may be seen when there is comparison of a body of New World texts en masse with the texts printed by Professor Child.