Abbey Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago on August 6, 1930, the tenth of twelve children, and grew up in Calvin Center, in Cass County, Michigan. She sang in public while still in high school and in 1951 went west to look for work, performing under several names, among them Gaby Lee and Gaby Wooldridge. Two years in Honolulu nightclubs brought her into contact with Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, and in Los Angeles she met the lyricist Bob Russell, who became her manager and suggested the name Abbey Lincoln, joining Westminster Abbey to Abraham Lincoln.

Her first album, Abbey Lincoln's Affair... A Story of a Girl in Love, was recorded in Hollywood on November 5 and 6, 1956, for Liberty, with arrangements by Benny Carter, Jack Montrose and Marty Paich. She also sang "Spread the World, Spread the Gospel" in the film The Girl Can't Help It, wearing a dress Marilyn Monroe had worn in an earlier film; she later said she resented how she was packaged in those years and burned the dress. Max Roach introduced her to Riverside Records, and her next three albums were made there: That's Him! (recorded in 1957, with Sonny Rollins, Kenny Dorham, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Roach), It's Magic (1958) and Abbey Is Blue (1959). On these records she moved from standards toward songs about loss and injustice.

In 1960 she sang on Roach's We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, a five-part work on the civil rights movement and African independence with lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr., contributing wordless vocals that included the screaming "Protest" section of "Triptych." On February 22, 1961, she recorded Straight Ahead for Candid with Roach, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Julian Priester, Mal Waldron and Coleman Hawkins, and she appeared on Roach's Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961) and It's Time (1962). A reviewer who disliked her lyric for "Retribution" called her a "professional Negro," and her politics made jazz work harder to find. On February 15, 1961, she, Roach, Rosa Guy and Maya Angelou took part in a protest that interrupted a United Nations Security Council meeting after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. She and Roach were married from 1962 to 1970. In those years she worked more as an actress than a singer, appearing in Nothing But a Man (1964) and, opposite Sidney Poitier, in For Love of Ivy (1968), which brought her a Golden Globe nomination, and she made no albums of her own between 1961 and 1973.

After the divorce she lived in Los Angeles. On a visit to Africa in the early 1970s she was given the names Moseka in Zaire and Aminata in Guinea, and she sometimes used Aminata Moseka afterward. People in Me, recorded in Tokyo on June 23, 1973, with Dave Liebman, pianist Hiromasa Suzuki, bassist Kunimitsu Inaba, drummer Al Foster and conga player James Mtume, was the first album to feature her own compositions at length, and the live Live in Misty came out the same year. She returned to New York in the 1980s. Talking to the Sun (Enja, 1984) was followed by two albums of Billie Holiday songs for Enja, and her recording of "For All We Know" with pianist Geri Allen was used in the 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy.

The producer Jean-Philippe Allard of PolyGram France brought her to Verve, where she fulfilled a ten-album contract that began with The World Is Falling Down (1990), recorded in February 1990 with Charlie Haden, drummer Billy Higgins, trumpeter Clark Terry and alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. You Gotta Pay the Band (recorded February 25 and 26, 1991) paired her with Stan Getz in one of his last sessions, with Hank Jones, Haden and Mark Johnson, and was nominated for a Grammy. Devil's Got Your Tongue (1992) brought in J.J. Johnson, Stanley Turrentine and the Staple Singers; When There Is Love (1993) was a set of voice-and-piano duets with Hank Jones; and A Turtle's Dream (1995), with Haden, Pat Metheny, Roy Hargrove, Kenny Barron and Christian McBride, was also nominated for a Grammy. Who Used to Dance (1997), Wholly Earth (recorded June 1998, with vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson and Nicholas Payton), Over the Years (2000, with Joe Lovano) and It's Me (2003) followed. Jazz at Lincoln Center presented a three-concert retrospective of her songs in 2002, and in 2003 she was named an NEA Jazz Master.

Her last album, Abbey Sings Abbey (recorded in 2006 and released in 2007), was made up entirely of her own songs in a spare acoustic setting; it appeared in May 2007, while she was recovering from open-heart surgery. She passed away in a Manhattan nursing home on August 14, 2010, eight days after her 80th birthday, after a period of declining health; her brother David Wooldridge announced her death. HighNote later issued two concert albums from her March 1980 engagement at San Francisco's Keystone Korner, in 2015 and 2016.

Lincoln's chief influence was Billie Holiday, and critics often heard Holiday in her phrasing and in her way of living inside a lyric, though her voice sat lower and darker and her phrasing was more declarative. She combined bold projection with restraint, and in her later records she often shaped a line from long, held notes and conversational pacing. She was writing lyrics by 1961, when "Retribution" appeared on Straight Ahead, but critics took her seriously as a songwriter in her own right only in the last two decades of her life, when the Verve albums gathered pieces such as "Throw It Away," "Down Here Below" and "When I'm Called Home." Her work with Max Roach on the Freedom Now Suite gave jazz one of its earliest full-scale protest records, and her later writing kept to a reflective, moral tone. She was a role model as well as a stylistic source for younger singers; Cassandra Wilson has said she learned from Lincoln to put what her own life was about in the moment into a lyric.