Charles Davis was born May 20, 1933, in Goodman, Mississippi, to Lindsey Davis and Vernell Davis (née Coleman), during a period of severe racial repression in the Deep South. By 1936 his mother had relocated with him to Chicago's South Side. He was sent first to St. Benedict's, a Catholic boarding school in Milwaukee, before entering Chicago's DuSable High School in 1949, where he studied under the legendary band director Captain Walter Dyett, whose classroom produced a run of major jazz and popular musicians including Dinah Washington and Nat King Cole. Davis also studied for three years at the Chicago School of Music and took private lessons from John Hauser starting in 1951. He began on alto and tenor saxophone, later specializing on the much larger baritone.

Davis's professional career opened in Chicago, where he worked with organist Brother Jack McDuff before bandleader Al Smith called him in 1956 to back Billie Holiday for a two-month engagement at the Budland club, alongside featured tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. He then toured briefly with New Orleans R&B singer Clarence "Frogman" Henry, which gave him his first look at New York, before spending 1957 and 1958 touring and recording with Dinah Washington in a band led by fellow DuSable graduate, tenor saxophonist Eddie Chamblee. It was during this period that Davis began his decades-long association with bandleader Sun Ra, drawn together by a shared grounding in bebop; he moved in and out of Sun Ra's Arkestra for the rest of his life, eventually touring and recording with the band into the 2010s under Marshall Allen's direction after Sun Ra's 1993 death.

By 1959 Davis had settled permanently in New York and formed an enduring partnership with hard-bop trumpeter Kenny Dorham, the two co-leading working quintets with lengthy club residencies and a steady recording schedule until Dorham's death in 1972; asked late in life which musicians he missed most, Davis named Dorham first. Through the 1960s he built one of the busiest sideman careers of his generation, recording and performing with Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison (on the 1964 Impulse! date Illumination! and 1965's And Then Again), Illinois Jacquet's orchestra, Freddie Hubbard, Johnny Griffin, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, and Archie Shepp, and appearing on Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers' 1963 Golden Boy sessions. He also recorded and performed with John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie by his own later account, though no specific dated session with either has been independently confirmed. In 1964, DownBeat's International Jazz Critics Poll named him the year's best baritone saxophonist, cementing the reputation on that horn that would define most of his career; the same decade he joined Roswell Rudd's Jazz Composer's Orchestra, an association that ran from 1966 to 1976.

The 1970s brought Davis's first extended run as a bandleader in his own right. He was a member of drummer Louis Hayes's sextet from 1972 to 1974, a period that produced Ingia! (1974), on which Davis shared top billing with Hayes's band, and he recorded as part of the co-billed Cedar Walton/Hank Mobley Quintet on Breakthrough (1972-73). In 1979 he led his own sextet, with Walter Booker on bass, Kenny Barron on piano, Billy Hart on drums, Clifford Adams on trombone, and Tex Allen on trumpet, on Dedicated to Tadd (West 54), a tribute to composer Tadd Dameron recorded at New York's Vanguard Studios. Through the decade he also toured with Clark Terry's big band, memorably including a 1977 London engagement, and with Duke Ellington's Orchestra as directed by Mercer Ellington after Ellington's death.

The 1980s and 1990s deepened Davis's standing as both a section player and a working leader. He was a member of Philly Joe Jones's Dameronia, the repertory band devoted to Tadd Dameron's music, from 1981 to 1984, recording To Tadd with Love (1983) and Look Stop Listen (1983) alongside Johnny Griffin, and he toured extensively with Barry Harris and with pianist Abdullah Ibrahim's band Ekaya across Europe and Africa, appearing on Ekaya (Home) (1983), Water from an Ancient Well (1986), and The Mountain (1989). His own Super 80 (1984, Nilva Records) reunited him with Walter Booker in a quartet with Michael Carvin and Gene Adler, and Reflections (1990, Red Record, recorded in Italy) paired him with Barry Harris, Peter Washington, and Ben Riley in a hard-bop quartet date. He also continued an extensive relationship with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra that carried on past Thad Jones's 1978 departure for Denmark, documented on the band's live West Wind recordings into the early 1990s. Alongside his performing career, Davis taught for more than 25 years at Jazzmobile's workshops, at PS 179 in Brooklyn, at the Lucy Moses School, and privately for students at the New School; BMI named him a Jazz Pioneer in 1984.

Davis's own leader catalog continued to grow in his final two decades, and it documents a deliberate late-career shift: after decades of being best known for baritone, he returned to the tenor saxophone as his main horn, fronting his own working quartet. He is the tenor saxophonist, not baritone, on Roni Ben-Hur's Anna's Dance, recorded November 29, 2000, and released in 2001 on Reservoir, alongside pianist Barry Harris, drummer Leroy Williams, and Walter Booker again on bass; the individual Discogs release credit lists Davis specifically as "Tenor Saxophone," not baritone. He played both tenor and baritone on his own Blue Gardenia (2003, Reade Street Records), a quartet date with Cedar Walton, Peter Washington, and Joe Farnsworth, and tenor again on Plays the Music of Bent Jaedig: Our Man in Copenhagen (recorded February 2006, released October 2008 on Fresh Sound), a tribute to the Danish saxophonist with pianist Sam Yahel, bassist Ben Street, and drummer Kresten Osgood. In 1998 he also joined saxophonists Gary Smulyan and Ronnie Cuber in the one-off Three Baritone Saxophone Band at Ronnie Scott's in London, his last prominent baritone showcase on record. Land of Dreams (2007, Smalls Records), a quartet date with pianist Tardo Hammer, was co-produced by Davis and his second wife, Lori Davis (née Samet); after her death in 2012, his final album, For the Love of Lori (recorded September 2013, released 2014 on Reade Street Records), was named in her memory. Davis also continued to record as a leader under the name Charles Davis Allstars, cutting A Tribute to Kenny Dorham live in Basel, Switzerland, in October 2009 (released 2010, TCB Records), again on tenor. He kept touring with the Jimmy Heath big band and with occasional Sun Ra Arkestra dates under Marshall Allen into his final years, including a June 2014 BBC broadcast with the Arkestra in London. Charles Davis died July 15, 2016, in Manhattan, at age 83.

Davis's reputation in most jazz reference sources rests on the baritone saxophone: critic Leonard Feather called him one of the most impressive baritone players to emerge in the 1960s, and DownBeat's international critics poll named him the year's best on the instrument in 1964, a recognition that led big-band leaders as different as Clark Terry and Sun Ra to want him in their sax sections. But that reputation describes the middle of a long career, not all of it. Davis began on tenor and alto in Chicago, and in his last fifteen or so years he deliberately returned to tenor as his primary horn, fronting his own quartet on that instrument for Blue Gardenia, Plays the Music of Bent Jaedig, and the Tribute to Kenny Dorham live album, among others. His tenor saxophone credit on Roni Ben-Hur's Anna's Dance (2001) is a case in point rather than an exception: it reflects exactly where his primary instrument stood at that point in his career, verified directly against the individual Discogs release credit rather than assumed from his broader baritone reputation. Across whichever horn he played, colleagues and critics consistently praised Davis for a big, dependable tone and unflashy reliability, qualities that made him equally valuable soloing on his own dates and anchoring saxophone sections behind Sun Ra, Clark Terry, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra for decades.