We need a “Della and the Dealer” movie.

(Edited: 11 April 2025) They should make a movie based on this. Kind of like what they did with “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Either a direct take or a loose inspiration with modified lyrics. But either way, with the cat telling the story or filmed from the cat’s perspective would be additionally fun.

A POINT ON HOW A PARTICULAR LINE IN A DIRECT TAKE MIGHT WORK:

“The Dealer had a knife and the dog had a gun and the cat had a shot of Rye.”

Unless one takes the “dog” and “cat” as actually being humans colloquially referred to as such, this seems written just to bring a silly image to the song. Two options exist to make this serious:

1. Set the scene in the back of the bar, where Della and the animals are off to the side while Randy and the dealer have their altercation. The cat is given a liquid snack to keep him out of trouble, while the dog is wearing a pack holding a concealed firearm (be it belonging to the dealer or Della), the idea being that the canine was less likely to be searched. Yielding this once to the generally-disliked-by-me Chekov’s Gun rule, this weapon is used by either Della or Randy, to dispatch the dealer (in legitimate defense – the dealer attacks Randy with a knife).

2. More likely: The dog is facetiously credited by the storyteller (and possible witness) with possessing the firearm to cover for whichever human actually pulled the trigger on the Dealer. And since the storyteller is being a little bit silly, let’s give the cat one for the road. 

ADDENDUM 21 FEBRUARY 2025: Offered the following to the Lyric Interpretations page on the song:

Taking the story as serious: Coke dealer, his woman (Della), and their literal dog and cat head out across the American Southwest. They stop in a community and hang around a bar. Della takes up with guitar player named Randy, a friend of the storyteller (probablyd another worker at the bar). All five of them are in the back room of the bar, and the dealer comes at Randy with a knife. To make discovery less likely, the dog is wearing one of those service animal-type packs containing a handgun (slightly anachronistic, I admit, but not impossible in the time), while the cat is given some sort of liquid treat to keep him/her content (because, well, cats get pampered). Randy or more likely Della use the gun to stop the dealer. All four then run to the truck and skip out.

It is also very possible the gun is attributed to the dog’s possession to avoid incriminating whether it was Randy or Della who fired the shot. The  whole line does sound a little bit odd or fanciful.

Animals are most likely literal (not colloquial ways of referring to other humans) because of the line, “Two shadows ran from the bar that night, and A dog and A cat ran too.” This, especially given the ambiguous ”A” rather than “the” article, seems like a genuine attempt to depict the latter two as non-human/qualitatively distinct from the other runners. 

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Following up on previous interpretation:

Second idea is definitely it: The dog is credited by the storyteller (and possible witness) with possessing the firearm to cover for whichever human actually pull the trigger on the Dealer. And since the storyteller is being a little bit silly, let’s give the cat one for the road.