Benjamin David Goodman was born on May 30, 1909, in Chicago, the ninth of twelve children of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David, a tailor, had come from Warsaw in 1892, and his mother, Dora Grisinsky, from Kaunas; the family lived in the crowded Maxwell Street neighborhood. In 1919 his father enrolled ten-year-old Benny and two of his brothers in free classes at the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue, where the youngest was handed a clarinet. He took two years of lessons from Franz Schoepp, a clarinetist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, played in the boys' band at Hull House under James Sylvester, and at 13 earned his union card and worked on Lake Michigan excursion boats. His first models were the New Orleans clarinetists then working in Chicago, Jimmie Noone, Johnny Dodds and Leon Roppolo, and in the summer of 1923 he met the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. In 1926 he joined Ben Pollack's orchestra and made his first records; his first disc to be pressed, "When I First Met Mary" for Victor, was cut in Chicago on December 9, 1926.

Settling in New York, Goodman became a busy session player for radio, Broadway pits and record dates, sometimes on alto and baritone saxophone as well as clarinet, with the bands of Red Nichols, Ben Selvin, Ted Lewis and Isham Jones among others. He recorded for Brunswick under the name Benny Goodman's Boys, and in 1928 he and Glenn Miller wrote "Room 1411," Miller's first known composition. His Columbia records of 1933 and 1934 produced top-ten hits with Jack Teagarden on "Ain't Cha Glad?" and "I Ain't Lazy, I'm Just Dreamin'," with Mildred Bailey on "Ol' Pappy," and with Billie Holiday on "Riffin' the Scotch," cut at her first recording session, arranged by John Hammond on November 27, 1933. A four-month engagement at Billy Rose's Music Hall led him to form an orchestra, and NBC then hired the band for the late-night dance program Let's Dance. Hammond, who would become Goodman's brother-in-law, brought in Fletcher Henderson as an arranger after Henderson's own band folded, and Goodman hired members of Henderson's former band to teach his musicians the charts. Let's Dance ran about six months before a strike at its sponsor, Nabisco, ended it in May 1935.

Goodman's rise to national fame came in 1935. On July 1 the band recorded Henderson's arrangements of "King Porter Stomp" and "Sometimes I'm Happy," and on a cross-country tour the music finally landed with young dancers at McFadden's Ballroom in Oakland on August 19. Two nights later, on August 21, 1935, the band opened a three-week engagement at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, with trumpeter Bunny Berigan, drummer Gene Krupa and singer Helen Ward in the lineup. After an indifferent response to a first set of stock arrangements, Goodman opened the second with the Henderson and Spud Murphy charts, at Krupa's urging to play their own music, and the crowd erupted; the Palomar run is often described as the start of the swing era. From November 1935 he spent six months at the Congress Hotel in Chicago, where he took part in the Rhythm Club concerts organized by Helen Oakley, sitting in with Henderson's band and playing as a trio with Krupa and pianist Teddy Wilson, who had jammed with Goodman at a house party at Mildred Bailey's home earlier that year and whom Hammond had already put in the studio with him. Shortly after the band left Chicago in May 1936 to film The Big Broadcast of 1937 in Hollywood, the press began calling Goodman the "King of Swing," and on June 30, 1936, the band began the CBS radio series Camel Caravan.

The trio became a quartet in August 1936 when vibraphonist Lionel Hampton joined, and at a time when most bands, clubs and concert halls were segregated, Goodman's small groups were among the first integrated jazz ensembles to play for paying audiences. On the evening of January 16, 1938, his orchestra, trio and quartet played a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. The program surveyed jazz history, brought on members of the Count Basie Orchestra and Duke Ellington's band for a jam on "Honeysuckle Rose," and closed with a long "Sing, Sing, Sing," in which Goodman handed an unscripted solo to pianist Jess Stacy. The concert was preserved on acetates that surfaced years later and were issued by Columbia in 1950 as The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, which sold over a million copies. Krupa left to form his own band shortly after the concert, and trumpeter Harry James, who joined at the start of 1937, left after 1938 to launch his own band in January 1939 with Goodman's financial backing.

In 1939 the guitarist Charlie Christian, recommended to Hammond by Mary Lou Williams, was brought on stage at the Victor Hugo Restaurant in Beverly Hills on August 16 and played "Rose Room" for more than three quarters of an hour, by Hammond's account, and Goodman hired him. Christian played in the Goodman Sextet, formed that month, and in the orchestra until June 1941, and his electric guitar became a lead voice in small-group jazz; in the fall of 1940 the sextet also included Count Basie, the trumpeter Cootie Williams and the tenor saxophonist Georgie Auld. Henderson joined the organization as pianist and staff arranger, and Eddie Sauter supplied some of the band's most adventurous 1940s charts, including "Benny Rides Again" and "Clarinet a la King." Goodman's vocalists were Martha Tilton (1937 to 1939), Helen Forrest (December 1939 to August 1941) and Peggy Lee (August 1941 to 1943); Lee's 1942 hit "Why Don't You Do Right?" came from his orchestra. In March 1942 he married Alice Hammond Duckworth, John Hammond's sister. A licensing dispute between ASCAP and the publishers in 1941 and the musicians' union recording strikes of 1942 to 1944 and 1948 helped end the big-band boom, and singers took over the popularity bands had enjoyed.

In 1948 Goodman tried bebop. His bebop band drew on Wardell Gray, Stan Hasselgård, Buddy Greco and Zoot Sims; he sought advice from Mary Lou Williams and, in 1945, Mel Powell, and the Capitol recordings were praised by critics. After a little more than a year he returned to swing, saying it was what he knew best. In 1949 he took lessons from the classical clarinetist Reginald Kell, which meant changing his embouchure and fingering, and thereafter he performed and recorded the classical repertoire alongside jazz. He commissioned and premiered works including Béla Bartók's Contrasts (first recorded in 1940 with violinist Joseph Szigeti), Copland's Clarinet Concerto, Poulenc's Clarinet Sonata, Malcolm Arnold's Second Clarinet Concerto, Morton Gould's Derivations and Leonard Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue and Riffs. He recorded Mozart's Clarinet Quintet with the Budapest Quartet in 1938, and in July 1956 at the Berkshire Festival he recorded the Quintet with the Boston Symphony String Quartet and the Clarinet Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Munch. His band appeared in films from The Big Broadcast of 1937 to A Song Is Born (1948), and the 1956 film The Benny Goodman Story, with Steve Allen in the title role, dramatized his career.

In 1953 his reunited band and Louis Armstrong's group joined forces for a tour that ended in a quarrel between the two leaders. Through the 1950s and 1960s he assembled bands for tours and festival dates, among them a 1956 State Department tour of Japan, Burma, Cambodia, Malaya, Hong Kong and Thailand and the 1958 residency at the Brussels World's Fair issued as Benny in Brussels. In 1962 his orchestra made a State Department tour of the Soviet Union, with trombonist Jimmy Knepper, Jerry Dodgion and Turk Van Lake in its ranks, documented on Benny Goodman in Moscow. In 1975, after he and George Benson met during the taping of a PBS tribute to Hammond, the two recorded together, and Benson appears on Goodman's album Seven Come Eleven, issued in 1982. He kept performing, including a 40th-anniversary Carnegie Hall concert in 1978, and gave his last concert six days before his death. Goodman passed away of a heart attack on June 13, 1986, at his apartment in Manhattan House in New York City, at 77. He had been named to the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1957, was among the 1982 Kennedy Center honorees, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986, and he held honorary doctorates from institutions including Harvard, Yale and Columbia; his papers are at Yale University.

Goodman's technique was secure enough that he moved between hot swing solos and Mozart, and the official Goodman website says he very rarely made mistakes in recording sessions; his early models were the New Orleans clarinetists Jimmie Noone, Johnny Dodds and Leon Roppolo. As a leader he was a demanding perfectionist, known among musicians for the disapproving stare they called "The Ray," and the discipline showed in the precision of his ensembles. His bands, which relied on arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Mundy and Spud Murphy and later on charts by Eddie Sauter, put hot jazz in front of a mass dance audience, and they launched or advanced the careers of many players, among them Gene Krupa, Harry James, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and Charlie Christian. Hiring Wilson and Hampton for his trio and quartet, and Christian for his sextet, made him a leading figure in the early integration of American jazz, a decade before Jackie Robinson entered major league baseball. The critic Bruce Eder has called the Carnegie Hall concert of 1938 the most important jazz or popular music concert in history, the moment jazz was accepted by a "respectable" concert audience. In the sextet, Christian's electric guitar carried a lead voice beside Goodman's clarinet. After the swing boom faded he made a brief detour into bebop and, from 1949, rebuilt his embouchure under Reginald Kell to play classical repertoire, which he commissioned and premiered from composers including Béla Bartók and Aaron Copland. Younger players took him as a model: Lee Konitz received his first clarinet at eleven because of Goodman, and Jim Hall called hearing Christian on a Goodman record at thirteen his awakening to jazz. His great rival for the title of leading swing clarinetist was Artie Shaw, whose fans called him the "King of the Clarinet."