Benjamin Francis Webster was born March 27, 1909, in Kansas City, Missouri. He took violin lessons as a child, learned rudimentary blues piano from his neighbor Pete Johnson, and got his first pointers on saxophone from Budd Johnson. As a teenager he played alongside Lester Young in the Young Family Band, made his recording debut with Blanche Calloway, and by 1932 was a featured soloist on a classic session with Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra alongside Count Basie, Hot Lips Page, and Walter Page. Through the rest of the 1930s he worked in a succession of touring bands: Jap Allen, Andy Kirk, Fletcher Henderson (1934), Benny Carter, Willie Bryant, Cab Calloway, and a short-lived big band led by Teddy Wilson.

After brief stints in 1935 and 1936, Webster joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1940 and became its first major tenor saxophone soloist. Over the next three years he appeared on some of the band's most celebrated recordings, including "Cotton Tail," on which he both took a landmark solo and arranged the saxophone ensemble passage, and "All Too Soon." He counted Ellington's alto star Johnny Hodges as a major influence during this period, and grew close to bassist Jimmy Blanton and arranger Billy Strayhorn. Webster's volatile temperament made him difficult company for the rest of the band, and he left in 1943 (by one account after slapping Ellington), returning only briefly in 1948 and 1949. Recordings from his Ellington years are widely available on compilations such as The Blanton-Webster Band.

Webster spent the later 1940s working New York's 52nd Street, recording steadily as both leader and sideman with musicians including Raymond Scott, John Kirby, Sid Catlett, Bill DeArango, Jay McShann, and Jimmy Witherspoon. In the 1950s he toured with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic package and became a mainstay of Granz's Verve/Norgran studio dates. His 1953 session with the Oscar Peterson Trio, released as The Consummate Artistry of Ben Webster and later reissued as King of the Tenors, launched a decade of prolific leader recordings for Granz, including Music for Loving (1955), a 1956 quartet session with pianist Art Tatum (released 1958 as The Art Tatum-Ben Webster Quartet), Soulville (1957, again with Peterson), and Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster (recorded December 16, 1957), which paired him with fellow tenor giant Coleman Hawkins, a friend since their Kansas City days. On December 8, 1957, Webster appeared in the landmark CBS television broadcast The Sound of Jazz, playing behind Billie Holiday and Lester Young on "Fine and Mellow" alongside Hawkins, Count Basie, and Gerry Mulligan.

In the late 1950s Webster formed a quintet with Mulligan that played regularly at the Renaissance club in Los Angeles, backing blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon on a live Hi-Fi Jazz recording before Webster and Mulligan cut Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster for Verve in 1959. The following years brought The Warm Moods (1961, Reprise, with strings), BBB & Co. (1962, Prestige Swingville, with Benny Carter and Barney Bigard), Soulmates (1963, Riverside, with pianist Joe Zawinul and cornetist Thad Jones), and See You at the Fair (1964, Impulse!, with pianists Hank Jones and Roger Kellaway), his final American studio recording.

In late 1964 Webster moved to Europe, where his style, out of fashion in the United States, was still celebrated. He lived in London and Scandinavia, then spent three years in Amsterdam, before settling permanently in Copenhagen in 1969. He worked steadily with local and expatriate musicians, recording live sessions such as Stormy Weather (taped January 30, 1965, at Copenhagen's Café Montmartre with pianist Kenny Drew, bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and drummer Alex Riel) and later dates with Dutch pianist Tete Montoliu and Spanish-Catalan players. In 1971 he reunited with the Ellington Orchestra for shows at Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens and recorded in France with pianist Earl Hines, in a session that also included Don Byas, Roy Eldridge, Stuff Smith, and Kenny Clarke. He also appeared as a saxophonist in a Copenhagen nightclub scene in the 1970 Danish film Quiet Days in Clichy.

Webster suffered a stroke in Amsterdam in September 1973, shortly after performing in Leiden, and died on September 20 at age 64. His body was cremated in Copenhagen, and his ashes were buried in the city's Assistens Cemetery. He had played the same saxophone since 1938 and left instructions that it never be played again; it is now held by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. Arranger Billy Moore Jr. and the trustee of Webster's estate established the Ben Webster Foundation shortly before his passing to secure his royalties and support jazz in Denmark; confirmed by royal seal in 1976, the foundation still awards an annual Ben Webster Prize to a young musician.

Webster was considered one of the "big three" swing-era tenor saxophonists alongside Coleman Hawkins, his earliest and strongest influence, and Lester Young. He built a style of striking contrasts: a tough, raspy tone punctuated by his own distinctive growls on up-tempo stomps, set against warm, breathy, intensely sentimental phrasing on ballads. Critics have noted that his time in the Ellington Orchestra alongside Johnny Hodges pulled his conception further from Hawkins's model toward something more personal and vocal-like. His late-career ballad playing in particular became his signature and drew a new generation of admirers even as his hard-swinging style fell out of critical fashion in the modernist 1950s. His tone and phrasing went on to influence later tenor players including Archie Shepp, Lew Tabackin, Scott Hamilton, and Bennie Wallace.