[2] The songwriting for "Farther Up the Road" is credited to Joe Medwick Veasey, a Houston-area independent songwriter/broker, and Duke Records owner Don Robey.

[5] According to music critic Dave Marsh, "Bland's deep vocal and Scott's arrangement, which swings as hard as it rocks, links Ray Charles' big band R&B to more modern currents in Southern soul".

[6] Bland's smooth vocals are contrasted with Pat Hare's raucous, overdriven guitar fills and soloing,[7] a style which prefigured the blues-rock sound of the late 1960s.

[8] Music critic Dave Marsh adds that the song is "a virtually perfect Texas blues ... [Pat Hare's] signature lick provides the missing link between T-Bone Walker and Eric Clapton".

[6] The backing arrangement is provided by the Bill Harvey Orchestra, who added a big band-influenced[9] intro and outro as well as chord substitutions to the twelve-bar scheme.

[10] Part of the song's success may be due to Bland's "telling a convincing story, making brief lyrical vignettes highly believable with his conversational style".

[11] Author Anand Prahlad comments on the song's use of "the theme of reciprocity":[12] Farther on up the road, someone's gonna hurt you like you hurt me (2×) Farther on up the road, baby you just wait and see You got to reap just what you sow, that old saying is true (2×) Like you mistreat someone, someone's gonna mistreat you However, Prahlad adds, "His [Bland's] usage of the proverb contains a philosophical dimension that is absent from the other [songs with similar themes] and a momentary distance from the emotional wound".