Old stories never die

From A treasury of American anecdotes; sly, salty, shaggy stories of heroes and hellions, beguilers and buffoons, spellbinders and scapegoats, gagsters and gossips, from the grassroots and sidewalks of America by Benjamin Albert Botkin.   

If this book proves anything about American storytelling, it is that “Old stories never die.” The reason is, of course, that there are always new storytellers to put old wine into new bottles. Moreover, through long, hard, rough usage, traveling anecdotes have acquired a briar-patch-bred toughness and resilience that enables them to endure and, in enduring, to outlast more ambitious works. They have been around for a long, long while, and are here to stay.