Bobbe Gorin Long, known from childhood as Beegie, was born on December 11, 1937, in Cave City, Kentucky, where her parents ran a gas station. She started piano lessons at five, graduated from Caverna High School in 1954, and took a bachelor of science in music education at Western Kentucky University in 1958. After three years of teaching children's music she moved to Nashville in 1961, enrolling in graduate study at Peabody College; by 1963 she had left school to play full time. In Nashville she played the clubs of Printer's Alley and joined a jazz band led by the guitarist Hank Garland.

Through the 1960s and 1970s she became a sought-after Nashville session and rehearsal pianist, playing at various times for the noon show on WSM-TV and on The Johnny Cash Show (1969 to 1971). Over the years she accompanied Chet Atkins, Dinah Shore, Peggy Lee, Ray Stevens, Steve Allen, Cass Elliot, Vince Gill and Dolly Parton, and with her husband, the musician Billy Adair, she wrote jingles for television commercials. In 1982 she and the Nashville saxophonist Denis Solee formed the Adair-Solee Quartet, which grew into the sextet Be-Bop Co-Op.

Her first album under her own name, Escape to New York, was issued in 1998 from a trio session recorded in December 1990 with the bassist Bob Cranshaw and Gregory Hutchinson on drums. Her recording career took off with Dream Dancing: Songs of Cole Porter (2001), made with the bassist Roger Spencer and the drummer Chris Brown and produced by the guitarist Jack Jezzro. That lineup became the Beegie Adair Trio, which went on to record some 35 albums, mostly for Green Hill Productions: songbook sets devoted to Porter, Rodgers, Kern, Ellington, Berlin, Gershwin, Mercer and Carmichael, tributes to Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and Tony Bennett, solo-piano programs, and holiday records. In all she appeared on more than 100 recordings, and the trio is credited with sales of more than 1.5 million albums.

She was also a teacher and institution builder. She taught jazz improvisation at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music from 1993 to 2002 and again in 2005 and 2006, and in the 1990s she helped found the Nashville Jazz Workshop with Roger Spencer and the pianist Lori Mechem, serving as faculty and a board member. She also hosted an NPR radio program, Improvised Thoughts, and twice sat in as guest host for Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. In 2002 she was named a Steinway Artist and was inducted into the Western Kentucky University music department's hall of fame; she was also honored in Cave City's hall of fame, and the Nashville Jazz Workshop gave her the first of its Heritage Awards. From 2011 her trio played Birdland in New York City regularly, often joined by the singer Monica Ramey, and in 2013 the Jazz Journalists Association named her a Jazz Hero.

Billy Adair, her husband of 38 years and the director of Blair's big band program, died in February 2014. She went on recording, releasing Too Marvelous for Words with the saxophonist Don Aliquo in 2015, Some Enchanted Evening with Ramey in 2016 and the compilation By Request in 2017. Beegie Adair passed away at her home in Franklin, Tennessee, on January 23, 2022, at the age of 84.

Adair was a melodic, fleet-fingered straight-ahead pianist whose repertoire was the standard song and the show tune. AllMusic names four main influences on her playing: George Shearing, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner. Much of her catalogue consists of themed tribute and songbook albums aimed at a broad audience, a format that sold well for her trio, but the live set The Real Thing (2012) shows the same group working through "Caravan," "How High the Moon" and Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm-A-Ning." Her long experience as a Nashville studio accompanist carried over into her vocal albums with Monica Ramey and Jaimee Paul, and into her teaching, where she mentored a generation of younger Nashville players through the Nashville Jazz Workshop.