Annie Murphy Paul, "Music Can Aid Memory"

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/09/how-music-can-improve-memory/

Information set to music, suggests research, is better retained, as it taps into time-honored strategies that help information stick.  These are the characteristics of successful oral-tradition narratives:
1. Employing concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. 
2. Using powerful visual images.
3. Singing/chanting 
4. Utilizing patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. 

A study by Rubin showed that when two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme, contemporary college students remember them better than non-rhyming words. 

Songs and rhymes can be used to remember all kinds of information. A recentstudy published in the journal Memory and Cognition finds that adults learned a new language more effectively when they sang it.