Further Up the Road: Blues Song Guide

Usually titled "Farther Up the Road," though "Further Up the Road" is a common and widely used variant, this song was written by Duke Records owner Don Robey and Houston songwriter Joe Medwick Veasey, and recorded by Bobby "Blue" Bland in Houston in 1957. Released with "Sometime Tomorrow" as its B-side, it became a major hit, reaching number one on the Billboard R&B chart and crossing over to number 43 on the pop Hot 100, establishing Bland as one of the defining voices of electric blues and soul-blues.

The song's authorship has its own well-documented backstory, one that says a lot about how the blues business actually worked in the 1950s. Texas blues guitarist Johnny Copeland said he and Medwick wrote the song together in a single night, after which Medwick sold it to Robey, who then took a writing credit despite, by most accounts, not having written it. Medwick reportedly sold the rights to this and other songs to Robey for as little as ten to fifteen dollars apiece, a common and exploitative arrangement on independent R&B labels of the era. Bland himself maintained that Medwick wrote the song with no creative involvement from Robey at all.

Despite that contested history, the song's stature in blues history is not in doubt. Bland's original recording was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2022, in the "Classics of Blues Recording, Singles" category, cementing its place as one of the defining blues sides of the 1950s. Its slow-burning, twelve-bar structure, built around a vocal of quiet, dignified warning rather than open anger, became a model for countless blues vocalists who followed.

Eric Clapton adopted the song as a staple of his own live repertoire under the title "Further On Up the Road," with a notable live recording from a 1975 performance at the Providence Civic Center appearing on the compilation Crossroads 2: Live in the Seventies. The song has also remained a fixture of Bland's own catalog, including his celebrated collaborative live recordings with B.B. King, keeping it in constant rotation across blues festival stages for well over half a century.

Hear Bobby "Blue" Bland's original and Eric Clapton's live version through their official pages on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Continue to Drowning on Dry Land or ahead to Going to Build Me a Playhouse, and see more entries at our blues music guide.