Bernard "Buddy" Rich was born on September 30, 1917, in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, to Bess Skolnik and Robert Rich, who were both vaudevillians. At eighteen months he joined their act, dressed in a sailor suit and playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" on a snare and bass drum before tap-dancing out from behind the kit, and by the age of four he was headlining on Broadway as "Baby Traps the Drum Wonder." As a teenager he was reportedly earning $1,000 a week, which made him one of the best-paid child entertainers of the 1930s. He was largely self-taught, and in 1942 he and the teacher Henry Adler co-wrote a book of snare drum rudiments.

He began playing jazz in the late 1930s with the clarinetist Joe Marsala's combo, then worked in the big bands of Bunny Berigan and Artie Shaw. Shaw, who found that Rich played for himself and his audience rather than for the leader, suggested he take an offer from Tommy Dorsey, and in 1939 Rich joined Dorsey's orchestra. He stayed until 1942, when he entered the U.S. Marine Corps; he served as a judo instructor, never saw combat, and was discharged in 1944 for medical reasons, after which he returned to Dorsey. Their band also carried a young singer, Frank Sinatra, and the two men's rivalry in those years sometimes turned into brawls. They stayed friends for life, and Sinatra later helped finance Rich's postwar band.

That band, formed in 1946, played the Apollo Theater and other big rooms and was led on and off into the early 1950s. Rich also toured with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic and became one of the drummers Granz used regularly on his Clef, Norgran and Verve sessions. Among the records from those years are a 1946 trio date with Lester Young and Nat King Cole; sessions with Charlie Parker, including the 1952 reunion with Dizzy Gillespie issued as Bird and Diz; trio sides with Bud Powell; a trio album with Lionel Hampton and Art Tatum, recorded August 1, 1955; and the Hampton quartet billed as Hamp's Big Four, with Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown. He is the drummer on Ella and Louis (1956), with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Between 1953 and the mid-1960s he worked off and on with Harry James, and he spent 1954 and 1955 back with Dorsey. His own dates of the decade range from Buddy and Sweets (September 1955, with the trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison) to Krupa and Rich (1956), on which he and Gene Krupa trade drum solos on "Bernie's Tune," and to a run of vocal albums that includes Buddy Rich Sings Johnny Mercer (1956). Rich versus Roach (1959) set his quintet against Max Roach's in opposite stereo channels. A heart attack in 1959 slowed him only briefly.

In 1966 he formed the big band that occupied him for the rest of his life. Its first album, Swingin' New Big Band (Pacific Jazz, 1966), was recorded live, with Bobby Shew in the trumpet section, and included a West Side Story medley arranged by Bill Reddie that became a fixture of Rich's concerts. Big Swing Face followed in 1967, and in 1968 Mercy, Mercy was recorded live at Caesars Palace and included Reddie's twelve-minute "Channel One Suite." The same year he made Rich à la Rakha with the tabla player Alla Rakha, and in 1969 Buddy & Soul was taped at the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood. The band mixed jazz originals and standards with arrangements of rock and pop songs, and Rich said most of its dates were at high schools, colleges and universities. Its alumni included Richie Cole, Don Menza, Pat LaBarbera, Walt Weiskopf, who joined in 1981, and Greg Gisbert, who made his debut with the band on August 2, 1985. Among the later records, Rich in London (recorded at Ronnie Scott's Club in 1971) and Very Live at Buddy's Place (1974), with Kenny Barron on piano, document the band and a septet at close range, and in January 1978 he recorded the direct-to-disc Together Again: For the First Time with Mel Tormé.

Rich was also a familiar television figure. He appeared on The Steve Allen Show and, over many years, on The Tonight Show, where Johnny Carson, a drum enthusiast, was a lifelong friend. A February 6, 1973, concert at the Top of the Plaza in Rochester, New York, was broadcast by PBS and introduced the full band to a generation of young drummers, and in a 1981 episode of The Muppet Show he played a drum battle against the Muppet drummer Animal. He was also known as a short-tempered bandleader; a pianist on his early-1980s tours, Lee Musiker, secretly taped some of his outbursts, and Tormé used excerpts in his 1991 biography Traps the Drum Wonder.

Rich had quadruple bypass surgery in 1983 and kept touring. In March 1987 he was hospitalized in New York with paralysis on his left side, was moved to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, and had a brain tumor removed on March 16. He passed away there on April 2, 1987, at 69, and was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery; Sinatra spoke at the funeral. His wife Marie, a dancer he had married in 1953, and their daughter Cathy, a vocalist who sang with his band, survived him. In 1994 the Rush drummer Neil Peart produced Burning for Buddy: A Tribute to the Music of Buddy Rich, in which rock and jazz drummers including Joe Morello, Steve Gadd, Max Roach, Billy Cobham, Dave Weckl, Simon Phillips, Steve Smith and Peart played with the Buddy Rich Big Band; a second volume followed in 1997. Rich received an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music in 1980, was elected to the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 1986, and was given a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in 2017. The 2014 film Whiplash makes him the idol of its drummer protagonist.

Rich was known for speed, power and precision, and his technique became the measuring stick many drummers hold themselves to. He held his sticks in the traditional grip, switched to matched grip for the floor toms, and made a show of crossing his arms to play them. He built long solos on contrasts, in particular a single-stroke roll that sped up and swelled on the snare, then moved toward the rim and died away to a whisper and came back again. He could also play quietly: on the Hampton and Tatum trio album he used brushes almost throughout. He never learned to read music and learned a new arrangement by hearing the drum part played at rehearsal, remembering its measures and its shape. He listed Gene Krupa, Jo Jones, Chick Webb, Ray McKinley, Ray Bauduc and Sid Catlett among his influences, and Krupa called him the greatest drummer who ever lived. He regarded the drummer as the real quarterback of a band and disliked bandleaders, the quality Shaw had noticed in 1939.

His reach goes well beyond jazz. Dave Weckl, Vinnie Colaiuta, Adam Nussbaum, Simon Phillips, John Bonham, Carl Palmer, Ian Paice, Max Weinberg and Travis Barker are among the players who have cited him, and Steve Gadd counts him among his influences, Jeff Hamilton added him to his early listening, and Sherrie Maricle switched to drums after seeing him perform live. Mel Lewis came to define his own big-band approach in contrast to the display-driven model Krupa and Rich represented. Rolling Stone readers ranked him fifteenth on a 2016 list of the 100 greatest drummers. On the session work he did for Granz, including dates with Oscar Peterson's trio, he was often less prominent than in front of his own band, which from 1966 until his death was the main outlet for his playing.