Betty Carter was born Lillie Mae Jones on May 16, 1929, in Flint, Michigan (some sources, including Britannica, give 1930; Carter herself is known to have carried a forged birth certificate as a teenager to get into nightclubs underage, which likely accounts for the discrepancy). Her family moved to Detroit while she was young, where her father, James Jones, directed the choir at a local church. She studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory of Music starting around age fifteen and began singing at sixteen, sneaking out against her parents' wishes to compete in amateur nights at Detroit clubs. Detroit's postwar jazz scene brought her into direct contact with touring stars: Dizzy Gillespie, passing through frequently, is credited with encouraging her early scat singing, and by sixteen she had sat in with Charlie Parker's band, working alongside bassist Tommy Potter, drummer Max Roach, and trumpeter Miles Davis.

Lionel Hampton hired her for his touring orchestra in 1948, and it was Hampton's wife Gladys who coined the nickname "Betty Bebop," shortened to Betty Carter, a name Carter reportedly disliked for the rest of her life. Bandmates during her nearly three years with Hampton (1948-1951) included Charles Mingus and Wes Montgomery, along with trumpeter Benny Bailey and trombonist Al Grey. Carter's refusal to sing straight melody and her insistence on improvising within Hampton's swing charts led him to fire her seven times over that stretch, by her own later account, before she left the band for good in 1951. She spent the first half of the 1950s working New York clubs and the Apollo Theatre circuit, recording with King Pleasure and pianist Ray Bryant, which led to her first LP as a co-leader, Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant (1955, released 1956 on Epic).

Her profile rose sharply after Out There with Betty Carter (Peacock, 1958), a hard-bop session arranged in part by Gigi Gryce and Benny Golson with a band including Kenny Dorham, Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones, Melba Liston, and Sahib Shihab. Miles Davis recommended her to Ray Charles, and she toured as Charles's opening act and duet partner beginning in 1960, cutting Ray Charles and Betty Carter (ABC-Paramount, 1961) in Hollywood that June. The album's "Baby, It's Cold Outside" became an R&B chart hit and gave Carter her widest popular exposure to date. She continued to work through the early 1960s on The Modern Sound of Betty Carter (ABC-Paramount, 1960), 'Round Midnight (Atco, 1963), and Inside Betty Carter (United Artists, 1964), then married and had two sons, stepping back from constant touring while continuing to perform to preserve her own income.

Dissatisfied with a jazz record industry she felt had lost interest in vocalists doing anything but standards, Carter founded her own label, Bet-Car Records, in 1969, later saying, "I think I was probably the first independent label out there in '69." Bet-Car became her only outlet for new recordings for the next eighteen years. She rebuilt her career from the ground up through relentless touring, including a long run of college and university dates beginning at Vermont's Goddard College in 1972, an appearance on the first season of Saturday Night Live in 1976, sets at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1977 and 1978, and a 1977 guest lecture on jazz history alongside Dizzy Gillespie at Harvard. Finally, Betty Carter (Roulette, 1975), a live album actually recorded at Judson Hall in New York in December 1969 with pianist Norman Simmons, and Now It's My Turn (Roulette, 1976, with a young pianist named John Hicks) marked her return to visibility, and The Audience with Betty Carter (Bet-Car, recorded live December 1979 at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, released 1980) is widely regarded as her finest album, a two-LP set with Hicks on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass, and Kenny Washington on drums.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Carter's own bands became one of the most reliable proving grounds in jazz: pianists Benny Green, Stephen Scott, John Hicks, Mulgrew Miller, Cyrus Chestnut, Marc Cary and Xavier Davis, bassists Curtis Lundy, Christian McBride, Michael Bowie and Ira Coleman, and drummers Kenny Washington, Lewis Nash, Winard Harper, and Gregory Hutchinson all passed through her working trio before establishing their own careers. Look What I Got! (Verve, 1988), her first release after signing with Verve and her only widely available new studio record in years, won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female at the 31st Grammy Awards in 1989. She followed it with It's Not About the Melody (1992, rotating in three different working trios across its eleven tracks), Feed the Fire (1994, a live document from London's Royal Festival Hall with pianist Geri Allen, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette), and I'm Yours, You're Mine (1996). In 1993 she founded Jazz Ahead, a workshop for young jazz composer-performers, first hosted at 651 ARTS in Brooklyn; the program moved to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. in 1998, the same year Carter passed away, and the Kennedy Center has run it every year since under her name. President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 1997, which she called the most meaningful honor of her career. Betty Carter died of pancreatic cancer in New York City on September 26, 1998, at age 69.

Carter treated her voice as an improvising instrument rather than a melody carrier, radically reworking tempo, harmony, and phrasing on nearly every performance so that a given song rarely sounded the same way twice; critics and colleagues routinely described her as the most harmonically adventurous jazz singer of her generation, closer in spirit to a bebop horn player than to the more song-faithful readings favored by contemporaries like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. That restlessness extended to how she built her bands: rather than hiring seasoned sidemen, she deliberately recruited unknown musicians in their teens and twenties, pushed them hard on the bandstand, and let them go once they were ready to lead their own groups, a practice she described by saying she learned as much from her young players' rawness as they learned from her. The result, cemented institutionally through Jazz Ahead, is a mentorship legacy nearly unmatched among jazz vocalists, with alumni spanning from Benny Green and John Hicks in the 1970s and 80s to Jason Moran, Cyrus Chestnut, and, in Jazz Ahead's continuing Kennedy Center years, dozens of subsequent young musicians including Or Bareket.