BOOK REVIEW : Homespun Stories of the Old Days, Ways : THIS OL’ DROUGHT AIN’T BROKE US YET (But We’re All Bent Pretty Bad), <i> by Jim Garry</i> , Orion Books $18; 240 pages

“The story is not only true,” writes Jim Garry about one of the tall tales in “This Ol’ Drought Ain’t Broke Us Yet,” “but quite possibly factual.”

Garry spins quite a few yarns before he’s done, and we are warned by the bio on the dust jacket--Garry’s a cowpoke and a media consultant as well as “a few other things”--that he is perfectly capable of putting a spin on his stories.

“The last liar,” he writes by way of explanation of one-upmanship among storytellers, “never has a chance.”

Garry hails from the “Wild Horse Prairies,” the hardscrabble ranch lands of Central Texas, where he was raised on a diet of “stories of the old days and the old ways.” Clearly, he has never lost the savor for a well-told story, and his collection now spans the continent from Never Sweat, Wyo., to the Georgia Sea Islands. But some of the very best stories are the ones he heard, quite literally, at his grandmother’s (and grandfather’s) knee.

“The stories I grew up on were the history of that land,” he writes, “and, by implication, the history of all land and the people who love it.”

The world that he shows us in “This Ol’ Drought” is populated with wranglers and cowpunchers, bull riders and shepherds, bootleggers and bank robbers, country lawyers and country sheriffs, the restless ghosts of hanged men, and even a President or two. Buffalo Bill makes a brief appearance; so do Bonnie and Clyde. And Garry tells us how Butch Cassidy once rode to the rescue of his own dog when the poor creature failed to outrun a posse.

“Get up in the rocks,” he told his cohorts in the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, “and play some Winchester music for the locals.”

Now and then, Garry feels compelled to dress up these lean and sinewy stories with rather ornate prefaces and asides, and he is quick to draw on his own scrapbook of homilies: “Riding a horse doesn’t make you a horseman,” he drawls, “just as two people living together doesn’t make a marriage.”

But the muscle and bone of “This Ol’ Drought” are found in the tales, which Garry recounts with the practiced rhythms of campfire bards. We can almost hear his voice as we read his words on the printed page, and a few sparing touches of punctuation--”I’as seventeen . . . and about as green as you can be and still remember to breathe on a regular basis”--are enough to evoke voices from the Deep South and the Old West.

Indeed, Garry includes one story just to help us understand the dialects of the back country. A greenhorn surveyor questions a local rancher to determine the proper name of an unmapped brook, and he returns a few months later to post a sign that identifies it as “Crick Creek.”

A few of the stories reach all the way back to the Old West, but many of Garry’s best tales evoke the more recent days when Model-T technology first arrived on the frontier.

For example, he tells us of a rather vain country banker, eager to show off the first touring car in town, who drives around the block again and again and again--until the townsfolk realize that the hapless plutocrat does not know how to stop the car.

Garry even tells a few stories on himself, including an encounter with the ghost of a man with a slit throat and an account of his very brief career on the rodeo circuit. Indeed, he admits that his first and last effort at bull-riding ended when the animal threw him hard: “As I came off, he spun, and I realize just how much a rump roast can hurt if it hits you moving fast enough.”

Garry sees something profound and even metaphysical in the accumulation of wisdom and pain and humor that fill out these homespun stories. For example, he tells us a faintly comic tale of his father’s lifelong effort to find his way to “The Yegua Knobs,” an elusive destination on the Texas landscape that he never manages to reach.

“The Yegua Knobs are, no matter where I am, there on the horizon, teasing me on,” Garry writes. “They are not simply earth, rock, vegetation, and mockingbirds, but are composed equally of mystic qualities, principles, ideas and ideals.”

At these moments, I suspect, it is the media consultant rather than the cowpoke who speaks to us. But the real value of Garry’s admirable book is not so highfalutin.

By retelling the stories in “This Ol’ Drought,” and by telling them so winningly and so well, he rescues an artifact of American civilization from the musty oblivion of the anthropologist’s field notes and restores it to a living tradition.

“Oral literature is always a single generation from extinction,” Garry reminds us. “The stories only live in the telling.”