1. @Carl Ellis: Thank you for the information on "Aux Marches du Palais" a.k.a. "La Rève du Cordonnier". Your CD will re-emerge when you are not looking for it. I looked it up on the four mudcat threads that seem to mention it, and saw, with the very intersting note by Joe Offer on the old origins of the song and the"family of tunes" to which iti s set, two interesting things, viz.

(a) that French traditional songs are regarded as children's songs and as such have less prestie and attention (I know the phenomenon well, for when I had a subject it was children's literature, which is how I come to this 1950s little shoemaker, which was part of my own childhood, for the story)

(b) that in the genuinely folk "La Rève du Cordonnier" the princess prefers the shoemaker and it is thus a third-son/princess story.

2. This proves/indicates that in French folktale shoemakers and lovely maidens, princesses or just girls who like to dance, go together (not as far as I know the case in English folklore).

3. But what I asm now left with is -
- one Rosemary Clooney new French refrain to the 1950s Little Shoemaker      
- two French texts possibly related to the 1950s shoemaker
- three [turtle doves -- no, only joking] French texts I cannot read because I did not have that sort of edjimakyshun...

So would/will you help with any or all of the translations (Clooney is on youtubeand upthread), pls? FWIW, anything I write I will acknowledge all help recd.   

4. What then, did the Gaylords sing on the other side of their "Little Shoemaker", and what was its non-English component? If it was French it implies something different from if it was Italian.

@beeliner: with me, the Gaylords could still call themselves that, because I still follow the older ordinary use of the word (as did a collegegirl in Delhi in the early 1970s, and an old Chinese lady and an old South Asian one in the mid 1980s, quite innocently)...

5.@ Genie: if your dulcimerist friends ever come this way, and are interested in accompanying me in my intended but as yet unwritten amateur mtrical-rhyming Englishing of the hitherto "untold story" in English, they would be very welcome.   

6. In case anyone is interested: just as there are folk faiytales, there are art-fairytales in a secondary genre which has its roots in the primary one (and in-between genres such as art-retellings/elaborations of folk fairy tales, into which I suppose most of Disney would fall). This secondary genre has, empirically, three varieties in English: burlesque (comic parody), romantic, and allegorical (the least close to the actual folk faiytale genre).

As a child, the bewitched fingers of the 1950s shoemaker and the girl waltzing "as though she were entranced", and the open ending not-in-marriage, made me group this song in my head with similar romantic art-fairytales (Kunstmaerchen). I see now that I was right to do so, in that there was more enchantment in the story before, a Kunst predecessor in Andersen, and a genuine Maerchen motif in the punishing shoes (for cruelty/then vanity/now heartlessness), going from peripheral to the story in Grimm to central thereafter, plus other traditional French shoemakers and damsels (as generic "relatives").

All that remains is to see whether there is anything at all additional in the Japanese. I doubt it, but it is possible.
   
Sanjay Sircar