Benny Golson was born in Philadelphia on January 25, 1929, the only child of Celadia Golson, who worked as a seamstress and a waitress, and Bennie Golson, who left the family before his son was old enough to know him. His mother started him on piano at nine and he first imagined a career as a classical concert pianist, drawn to Brahms and Chopin. An uncle who tended bar at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem took him to New York as a boy, where he heard the first generation of bebop players, Thelonious Monk among them. The decisive moment came at Philadelphia's Earle Theatre, where he watched Arnett Cobb take a tenor solo on "Flying Home" with Lionel Hampton's band; at fourteen he switched to saxophone. Benjamin Franklin High School put him in daily contact with an extraordinary group of contemporaries, including John Coltrane, Red Garland, Jimmy Heath, Percy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, Ray Bryant, and Red Rodney. He went on to Howard University, graduating in 1950.

His first professional work was with the singer and saxophonist Bull Moose Jackson's rhythm-and-blues band, whose pianist at the time was Tadd Dameron. Golson said for the rest of his life that Dameron was the single most important influence on his writing, and it was on Dameron's 1953 Prestige sessions, issued as A Study in Dameronia, that he made his recording debut, in a band that also carried the young trumpeter Clifford Brown. Over the next six years Golson passed through a remarkable sequence of employers: Dameron, Lionel Hampton, Johnny Hodges, and Earl Bostic, then Dizzy Gillespie's globe-trotting big band from 1956 to 1958, where his charts began to attract more notice than his playing. In 1958 he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers as tenor saxophonist and, briefly, music director, recruiting Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, and Jymie Merritt into the band that recorded Moanin' for Blue Note on October 30, 1958. He stayed with Blakey barely a year, but the record he made there is one of the defining documents of hard bop, and two of its pieces, "Along Came Betty" and "Blues March," were his.

Composing is where his reach is widest. "Stablemates" reached record before Golson himself had led a session: Miles Davis's first great quintet cut it in November 1955 for the Prestige album Miles, with Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. In June 1956, while working with Hampton's band at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Golson learned that Clifford Brown had been killed in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at twenty-five. He wrote "I Remember Clifford" as a threnody for him, and it became one of the most recorded memorial pieces in jazz. "Whisper Not," "Along Came Betty," "Blues March," "Are You Real?" and "Killer Joe" all followed within a few years, and all became standards, played and recorded by musicians who never met him.

The leader dates began in October 1957 with Benny Golson's New York Scene for Contemporary, a quintet with Art Farmer, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Charlie Persip, expanded to a nonet on three tracks. The Modern Touch followed that December for Riverside, with Kenny Dorham, J.J. Johnson, Kelly, Chambers, and Max Roach. Riverside's The Other Side of Benny Golson (November 1958) introduced the trombone-and-tenor front line with Curtis Fuller that Golson would return to for six decades, and a run of records for New Jazz followed: Groovin' with Golson, Gone with Golson, and Gettin' with It. In 1959 he and Art Farmer, who had been working together on and off since the early 1950s, formed the Jazztet, a sextet designed around three horns and closely written arrangements. Its debut, Meet the Jazztet, was recorded for Argo in February 1960 with Curtis Fuller on trombone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Addison Farmer on bass, and Lex Humphries on drums, and it carried the first recording of "Killer Joe." The band went through several lineups over the next two years, taking in Cedar Walton, Tom McIntosh, Albert Heath, Harold Mabern, and Grachan Moncur III, before Golson and Farmer wound it up in 1962 rather than keep paying for the rehearsal time the writing demanded.

What followed was the longest gap in his playing career. Golson moved into arranging and studio work, spent time in Europe, and recorded Stockholm Sojourn in 1964 with a Swedish and expatriate orchestra he conducted rather than played in. He then settled in Hollywood for roughly a decade of composing and arranging for television and film, supplying music for Mannix, Ironside, Room 222, The Partridge Family, M*A*S*H, and Mission: Impossible, and writing and conducting five arrangements for Eric Burdon's 1967 album Eric Is Here. He did not touch the saxophone seriously for years.

He came back in the mid-1970s, first with the Columbia album Killer Joe in 1977, a slick, funk-inflected production that reads now as a transitional record, and then with a run of acoustic dates for the Japanese Baystate label: California Message with Curtis Fuller in 1980, Time Speaks in 1982 with Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw, and This Is for You, John, a Coltrane tribute recorded in 1983 with Pharoah Sanders, Cedar Walton, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette. He and Farmer revived the Jazztet in 1982, with Fuller back in the trombone chair, and recorded Moment to Moment for Soul Note in Milan in 1983 and the live Real Time at Sweet Basil in 1986. From there he worked steadily for another thirty years: I Remember Miles in 1992, That's Funky with Nat Adderley in 1995, Tenor Legacy in 1996, One Day, Forever in 2001, Terminal 1 in 2004, New Time, New 'Tet in 2008, and Horizon Ahead for HighNote in 2016, at eighty-seven. He was a subject of Art Kane's 1958 group photograph A Great Day in Harlem and the object of the plot of Steven Spielberg's 2004 film The Terminal, in which Tom Hanks's character has crossed the Atlantic for the one autograph from that photograph he lacks; Golson appears in the film as himself. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1996, received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music in 1999, and was given the Grammy Trustees Award in 2021. He passed away at his home in Manhattan on September 21, 2024, following a short illness, at the age of 95.

Golson's early tenor sound was described as fibrous and slightly hoarse, built on the big-toned mainstream-modern line that ran through Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, and Arnett Cobb, the last of whom pushed him toward the instrument in the first place. During the 1960s he absorbed a good deal of John Coltrane's harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary, and when he resumed playing in the mid-1970s after more than a decade away, the change was audible enough that AllMusic's Scott Yanow heard less of the swing-era Don Byas in him and more of Archie Shepp: a rougher, more vocalized attack over the same architecture. But his largest claim is as a writer. He composed melodies that stand up without their harmony and harmony that rewards a soloist, and he built bridges (the release of "Along Came Betty," the descending line of "I Remember Clifford") that other players learned as set pieces. Six of his tunes entered the standard repertoire, which is more than almost any postwar jazz composer managed, and reference works routinely name him as one of the most significant contributors to the formation of hard bop. His arranging instincts, honed in Gillespie's big band and in the Jazztet's three-horn writing, are the other constant: even his small-group records are voiced, not just blown.