Ballads function as stories in song. Like legends, they are often based on historic events or people. Oral histories bring together personal experience stories about a person's life, family history, occupation, social and economic era. The spoken word, as the province of each of us, is layered with semantic symbols and narrative styles, the linguistic legacy of distinct regional and cultural communities. The boasting, toasts, and dozens of Black Americans, for instance, are examples of complicated systems of spontaneous invention and memorization skillfully brought into play within the boundaries of formal linguistic rules.
Occupational narrative is illustrated by oral narratives of working cowboys.
For more than a century, cowboys have composed poetry and more recently tell poems that express the emotions, rigors, history, and characters of ranch and cowboy life. These stories are molded into patterns of short, metrically tight, rhymed verses typical of nineteenth century literary poetry. A conventional form emerging at meals, roundups, and in the bunkhouse since the Civil War, the tone of cowboy poetry is upbeat, sentimental, humorous, or lightly ironic, and often bawdy. Storytelling style is a matter of wide variation. Storytellers in Missouri Performing Traditions are those with knowledge of how it used to be, or those knowing the anecdotes, history, and boasts of their communities.