It's easy to see the inseparability of the oral narrative and American culture; one needs only to spend five minutes in conversation, and sooner or later someone will have taken on the role of storyteller, whether he or she is recalling an event from work, paraphrasing events from the news, or talking about episodes from the past. It is an inevitability that people rely so much upon oral narrative. No other means of communication allows so much flexibility when addressing an audience. The oral narrative is fluid, as a storyteller adjusts his craft to best suit his or her audience. From one generation of storyteller to the next, a single tale can undergo countless changes, as it adjusts to the context of the time and place. "I work with folks to get their creativity to flow, to try to get them to use their imagination," says Georgetown storyteller Captain Sandy Vermont, "It's coming from inside of you. It hasn't been etched in stone as the written word is, and that's what I do with the storytelling."
With such a shift, many historians consider it important to preserve an oral narrative, saving a copy so that as it undergoes its transformations, its development can still be traced. One such historian is Elizabeth Huntsinger, a local Georgetown author whose books Ghosts of Georgetown and More Ghosts of Georgetown document some of the better-known tales of the low country. "[The stories] need to be documented every couple of decades, and hopefully somebody after my generation will do it because the oral tradition does change a little bit every year, and it needs to be written down," she says.