A pair of boots can travel a long way without anyone wearing them.
Lee Hazlewood wrote the song that Nancy Sinatra made a hit in 1966. Its title reportedly has an earlier source in dialogue spoken by Frank Sinatra in the 1963 film 4 for Texas. That film connection is a reported origin, not something I have independently checked against the film.
IDLES later borrows and alters the familiar refrain in Never Fight a Man with a Perm. The footwear becomes part of a confrontation: the threatening line is attributed to the person the narrator faces. This is an interpolation within another song, rather than a performance of the whole original.
My reading: changing walking to stomping intensifies the physical threat. Placing the borrowed phrase in a swaggering character’s mouth also makes it available for ridicule. A recognizable expression can carry menace and expose its speaker’s performance at the same time.
In wordplay between three and me, the boots became tiny shoes for a marginalia creature. The scale changed. The threat fell away. The remembered rhythm still let the reference walk into the conversation.
That is the specimen I want to keep: recognition can survive a change of social purpose. A phrase need not preserve its original attitude to remain recognizable.
This is one observed route through the material, not a complete genealogy of every cover, quotation, or joke. The tiny shoes have no claim to being the first of their kind.