"Royal Garden Blues" is a blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

 song composed by Clarence and Spencer Williams

Spencer Williams

Spencer Williams was an American jazz and popular music composer, pianist, and singer. He is best known for his hit songs "Basin Street Blues", "I Ain't Got Nobody", "Royal Garden Blues", "I've Found a New Baby", "Everybody Loves My Baby", "Tishomingo Blues", "Careless Love", and many...

 in 1919. Popularized in jazz by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, it has since been recorded by numerous artists and has become a jazz standard

Jazz standard

Jazz standards are musical compositions which are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners. There is no definitive list of jazz standards, and the list of songs deemed to be...

. The song is considered one of the first popular songs based on a riff

RIFF

The Resource Interchange File Format is a generic file container format for storing data in tagged chunks. It is primarily used to store multimedia such as sound and video, though it may also be used to store any arbitrary data....

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Clarence and Spencer Williams (no relation) collaborated on two other songs as well: "I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None o’ This Jelly Roll" and "Yama Yama Blues." It is speculated that Spencer Williams was the actual composer of the tunes, and that Clarence was given shared credit for publishing the song.