Short answers, pulled from the story.
Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, beliefs, ideas and culture are received, preserved and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission happens through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or poetry. It is described as the most widespread medium of human communication.
A griot is a hereditary repository of oral tradition found in Dyula, Soninke, Fula, Hausa, Songhai, Wolof, Serer and Mossi societies, and most famously in Mandinka society. Griots form a caste and act as historian, musician, poet, mediator, spokesperson and court figure, keeping records of births, deaths and marriages across generations. When Sundiata Keita founded the Mali Empire, he was given Balla Fasséké as his griot, beginning the Kouyate line.
The Vedas were preserved through elaborate recitation techniques called pathas, taught in schools known as Gurukul. All 1,028 hymns and 10,600 verses of the Rigveda were transmitted this way, using methods such as Samhita-patha, Pada-patha and Krama-patha that cross-checked one another. Michael Witzel compared the result to a tape-recording that preserved even the long-lost musical tonal accent.
Oral-formulaic composition is the process, identified by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, by which Homer's verse was composed extempore using stock phrases or formulas rather than rote memorization. Examples include eos rhododaktylos, meaning rosy fingered dawn, and oinops pontos, meaning winedark sea, which fit the six-colon Greek hexameter. John Miles Foley noted the theory has touched on more than a hundred ancient, medieval and modern traditions.
Islam draws on two sources of revelation, the Quran and the hadith, both rooted in oral transmission. The Quran, whose name means recitation in Arabic, was revealed to Muhammad from 610 CE until his death in 632 CE and compiled into the written mushaf about two decades later. Alan Dundes estimated that as much as one third of the Quran is made of oral formulas, and the phrase Allah created the heavens and the earth appears 19 times.
Yes, oral traditions can preserve real historical events over very long spans. A 2020 study found that the Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago, matching Gunditjmara oral histories of volcanic eruptions that may be among the oldest in existence. Pacific Northwest stories of a Thunderbird and a Whale have been linked to earthquakes and tsunamis, with some used to date events from 900 CE and 1700.
John Miles Foley consolidated oral tradition as an academic field when he compiled Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research in 1985, founded the journal Oral Tradition and established the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri in 1986. Earlier figures included Walter Ong, whose Orality and Literacy appeared in 1980, and Jan Vansina, whose 1961 book Oral Tradition argued for oral sources as valid historical evidence.