By conventional definitions 'shimrod' only the words and a tune make the 'tradition' traditional. So everything else is up for grabs, arrangement, instrumentation, idiom, style, presentation.

Unfortunately a whole load of other stuff got tangled up with those definitions, largely because of the enthusiasms of the original folk revivalists. A presentational mode that hints of a generalised agrarian past, what I call the Ewan McColl default, is seen as unproblematic whereas it is specious and arbitrary and resistant to vying modes.

Until the baby boomers go back to the hearth from which none return, we're stuck with folk signifiers as well as the tradition.