Royal Blue was a blues singer and songwriter who surfaced in New York in the mid-1970s, made one album with drummer Rashied Ali's quintet, and was killed before he could make another. "Royal Blue" is almost certainly a performing name. No legal name appears on the record, on its 1999 reissue, in the Discogs database, in the published reference literature, or in any interview located for this profile, and the songwriter credit on the disc label is given only as "R. Blue," published by Ali Music (BMI). What is documented about him comes from three places: the album itself, Roger Riggins's note on its back sleeve, and an account Ali gave in 2001.

Riggins's sleeve note is the only contemporary description of him. It places Blue between the styles of John Lee Hooker and Joe Turner, with a polish Riggins compared to Joe Williams's early work, and states plainly that Blue came from Texas, adding that a rural southern reading of what city life amounts to runs through his singing. Ali, interviewed by Steve Koenig for Perfect Sound Forever in February 2001, described him as a young singer who came to New York singing blues and nothing else, and said he had a drinking problem, trouble in his relationships, and a newborn child.

The record is N.Y. Ain't So Bad: Ali Plays the Blues, credited to Rashied Ali featuring Royal Blue and issued in 1976 on Ali's own Survival Records as SR 111. It was cut in two sessions, on July 12 and August 26, 1975, and all eight tracks were mixed on September 20, 1975. Blue sang with a quintet of Ali on drums, James Vass on alto saxophone and flute, Marvin Blackman on tenor saxophone and flute, Charles Eubanks on piano, and Benny Wilson on bass. Six of the eight titles are Blue's own: "New York Ain't So Bad," "Boss Home Town Love," "Moontipping," "Ladies and Gentleman Blues," "Real Blues," and "Royal's Blues." The other two are covers, B.B. King's "Everyday" and T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday." On "Real Blues" the band drops away and Blue sings accompanied only by Wilson's bass, the performance Riggins singled out on the sleeve. The cover photograph, by Seiji Kakizaki, shows Blue and Ali shaking hands at a waterside railing.

That the record exists at all is a function of what Ali had built. By 1975 he was running Ali's Alley, the club he had made out of his loft at 77 Greene Street in SoHo, and Survival Records, the label he had co-founded with saxophonist Frank Lowe to document work the established companies would not touch. A straight blues session with an unknown singer was the kind of thing only a musician-owned label would release, and Ali issued it under a subtitle, "Ali Plays the Blues," that flagged how far it sat from the free jazz he was known for.

Blue did not live to build on it. In the Perfect Sound Forever interview, Ali said Blue stepped into a domestic argument and was beaten to death with an iron pipe by his girlfriend's brother, and that he was left in the street on Third Avenue in New York, where he died. Will Hermes, writing about the loft-jazz years in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, places the killing shortly after the session. No date, no police record, and no press notice of the death were found for this profile, and the sequence rests entirely on Ali's telling.

One credit complicates that account. Archie Shepp's live album California Meeting: Live "On Broadway", recorded at the On Broadway Bar and Cafe in Sacramento on May 22, 1985 and issued on Soul Note in 1987, credits a guest vocalist named Royal Blue on "St. James Infirmary." The credit is printed in the album's own personnel list, appears in standard discographies and on jazzdisco.org, and Discogs files it against the same artist entity as the Ali album. Whether that is the same man, a second singer using the same name, or a database conflation could not be resolved from any accessible source, and the 1985 date cannot be squared with Ali's account of a death a decade earlier. It is recorded here as an open question rather than as part of his career.

Riggins's sleeve note locates Blue in a southern blues line running through John Lee Hooker and Big Joe Turner, and Steve Koenig, writing in Perfect Sound Forever, heard the Texas tradition in the way his phrasing slurred against the horns rather than sitting on the beat. Michael J. West of JazzTimes described him as a baritone in the Jimmy Rushing manner and made the sharper point about the record: it is the free-jazz generation demonstrating that it knew the tradition it stood accused of having skipped. Blue's own writing supports that reading. His six originals are plain twelve-bar and slow-blues frames whose subjects are rent, women, and getting high, and the interest in the record comes from a quintet of avant-garde players choosing to stay inside those frames while stretching them, not from any harmonic ambition on the singer's part.