Some stories come to us through music as sound and rhythms. Sometimes these sounds and rhythms have been handed down as a teaching from generation to generation. Sometimes the whole history of a people can be expressed through songs, and rhythms, dance, and performance. For all people, before there was the written word, there was the sound. Histories and stories of a people that come to us in a spoken and sung form are part of what is called an oral tradition.
Oral tradition means that the information, the stories, are told rather than written down.
Sometimes, a people have both a written and an oral tradition. Oral traditions have a different way of being alive than written histories. Because people hold the oral tradition in their memory, and sometimes the story changes with the telling, oral histories can be more fluid, more dynamic, more alive, than written histories. This doesn't make them less true, just different than written histories. The stories told by the drums, the stories told by the dancers, the stories told by the singers, and the writers are all part of our world.