In the rural area of northern China in which orality predominatesover literacy in verbal communication, traditional long stories are notread but listened to through regional opera, narrative music and otheroral performances. In this paper we deal with the narrative music genrelaoting dagu, found throughout Laoting and Luannan county, Hebeiprovince in China. In the dashu (extended tale) of laoting dagu, traditionallong stories are presented as alternations of song and narration.Most of the long stories, e.g. the famous "Yangjiajiang" (the warriors ofthe Yang family) and "Baogongan" (the Judge of Bao) have been widelydiffused. Their plot and content are common, to some degree. Butthe text, which is orally sung and narrated, differs from region to region,genre to genre and even performer to performer. The main reason forthis variability is that the stories have no written text and the performerhas no need to memorize one. Nevertheless many performers can narratethe story for several weeks or even several months successively. Howis this possible? Performers say that they improvise the text; they composeit at the actual moment of performance. On the other hand, Someparts of the text they narrate is a conventional one laid down by tradition.What parts are transmitted and what are composed in actual performanceis the main question of this paper. Some scholars of literatureconsider that the dashu belongs to the guci tradition, literary works forsinging and narrating published in Beijing and other cities during the lateQing and Minguo periods. Most repertories of dashu are included in thelist of guci. If guci was diffused to the rural area in past, why was notguci transmitted to and memorized by performers? This is the secondquestion of this paper.To solve the first question, three versions of the text of "Qingyunjian"(The Blue Cloud Sword) are compared and analysed. "Qingyunjian"is a popular oral narrative. An accompanist of laoting dagu arrangedand wrote down the text of "Qingyunjian" for his partner, a narratorof dashu. This written text and two versions narrated in the villageof Luannan in 1990 and 1993 are taken as examples. The narrator readthe written text once or twice, but he did not memorize it in general. Inperformance, he improvised, based on the plot and content of the writtentext. While he was narrating, the text was composed, so the writtenand oral texts are very different from each other. In the process fromwritten to oral, the only unchanged text was a set of verses describing oneof the characters. Except for this, the narrator told the story in wordsfamiliar to the audience. The two oral texts are very close to oneanother, in spite of a three year interval and different conditions. Thisexample of "Qingyunjian" makes it clear that once the narrator has improvisedthe text, it comes to be relatively fixed. By analogy with thisprocess of transmission and composition of "Qingyunjian", the reasonwhy the guci texts were not transmitted orally or in written form bygenerations of performers is clarified. For the performers in ruraldistricts, the written text has no priority over oral tradition. In laotingdagu, it can be said that the text exists only in the performance.