William James Edwards Lee III was born on July 23, 1928, in Snow Hill, Alabama, one of seven children in a musical household. His father, Arnold Wadsworth Lee, played cornet and led bands, and his mother, Alberta Grace Edwards Lee, was a concert pianist. His maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, had founded the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute, the school at the center of the family's history in the town. Lee went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where his schoolmates included Martin Luther King Jr. and the future drummer and bandleader Babatunde Olatunji, and graduated in 1951. Charlie Parker's records drew him toward bebop and the double bass. In 1954 he married Jacqueline Shelton, an art teacher, and they raised five children, among them the filmmaker Spike Lee, born in 1957.

After college he played in small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago. In Chicago he was the house bassist at the Gate of Horn, a folk club, and he worked with the pianist Chris Anderson, a friend since the late 1940s, and with the saxophonist Frank Strozier and the pianist Billy Wallace. In 1959 he moved his family to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and he lived in the neighborhood for the rest of his life.

New York in 1959 sat where the jazz clubs met the Greenwich Village folk revival, and Lee worked both sides. Odetta was his first major folk association, and his bass is on her 1959 and 1960 Vanguard albums and on the Newport Folk Festival recordings of those years. He played on Harry Belafonte's Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall (1960) and on records by Josh White, Theodore Bikel, Judy Collins, Ian and Sylvia, the Clancy Brothers, Tom Rush, Peter, Paul and Mary and Gordon Lightfoot. He is the bassist on Simon and Garfunkel's debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964), and on Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, where he plays on the electric first side and on the solo acoustic closer "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," recorded in January 1965. Obituaries put his total at more than 250 albums.

The jazz work ran alongside. He plays on nine of the twelve tracks of Aretha Franklin's first Columbia album, Aretha (1961), recorded with the Ray Bryant Combo, on most of Ray Bryant's Con Alma (1961), on John Handy's No Coast Jazz and Johnny Griffin's Change of Pace (Riverside, 1961), and on Chris Anderson's Inverted Image and Frank Strozier's March of the Siamese Children (both Jazzland, 1962). He was also writing for others. Max Roach recorded his "Jodie's Cha-Cha" and "Deeds, Not Words" for Deeds, Not Words (Riverside, 1958), his "Sporty" on Max Roach + 4 on the Chicago Scene (1958), and his "Quiet as It's Kept," which gave its name to the 1959 Mercury album.

By his estate's account, he and fellow bassists formed a group called Professionals Unlimited in 1967, which became the New York Bass Violin Choir, an ensemble of basses he directed and for which he wrote and arranged. In the 1970s he found a home at Strata-East, the musician-owned label started in 1970 and 1971 by Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell. For it he recorded with two groups of his own. The Descendants of Mike and Phoebe, named for ancestors on his mother's side who had been enslaved in Alabama, brought together his sister Consuela Lee Moorehead on piano, his sister A. Grace Lee Mims on vocals and his brother Clif Lee on flugelhorn, with Billy Higgins and Sonny Brown on percussion; A Spirit Speaks was recorded at Minot Studios in White Plains, New York, on December 19 to 21, 1973, and released in 1974. The Brass Company, which he co-founded with the trumpeter Bill Hardman and Higgins, made Colors (1975), a brass-and-rhythm record that includes Bob Stewart on tuba and Bernard McKinney, credited as Kiane Zawadi, on euphonium. He also played on other artists' Strata-East dates, among them Clifford Jordan's Glass Bead Games (1974) and Stanley Cowell's Regeneration (1976). The bass choir's own album followed in 1980, with Ron Carter, Richard Davis, Milt Hinton, Sam Jones, Lisle Atkinson and Michael Fleming alongside him, and with George Coleman on tenor saxophone and Harold Mabern on piano for two pieces.

The 1970s also tested his principles. As fusion spread and electric bass became standard, he refused to give up the upright instrument, and he told a reporter that he could never live with himself if he switched. He lost some work over it. He kept writing what he called narrative folk-jazz operas, including Baby Sweets, written with Sonny Brown, and One Mile East, drawn from his childhood summers in Snow Hill, and staged them at Central Park, Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival.

Spike Lee's first films gave him his widest audience. He scored the short Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983) and then the first four features. For She's Gotta Have It (1986) he played bass, produced and arranged the Island Records soundtrack and wrote its "Nola" theme, with Cedar Walton and Stanley Cowell on piano, Harold Vick on saxophones, Virgil Jones on trumpet, Joe Chambers and Kenny Washington on drums and Ronnie Dyson singing; he also plays Nola's father on screen. For School Daze (1988) he wrote and produced several pieces, including "Straight and Nappy" and "Wake Up Suite," and he appears on screen as the bassist in Phyllis Hyman's quartet. For Do the Right Thing (1989) he composed and conducted the score with his Natural Spiritual Orchestra, recorded at RCA Studios in New York on December 12 to 16, 1988, with Branford Marsalis on tenor and soprano saxophone, the trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Marlon Jordan, Donald Harrison on alto saxophone and Kenny Barron and James Williams on piano. For Mo' Better Blues (1990) he was the music director. The soundtrack album, credited to the Branford Marsalis Quartet featuring Blanchard, lists him as one of its producers and as the writer of its title track and of "Again, Never," a piece the quartet's recording took to a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group.

He and his son stopped working together in the early 1990s after a falling out over money and family matters, and Terence Blanchard, who had played on the Mo' Better Blues music, became Spike Lee's regular composer. Lee went on leading groups of his own. By his estate's account, his Mo' Betta Quartet and Quintet played in the 1990s and 2000s with musicians including Donald Harrison, Javon Jackson, Joe Chambers, Ronnie Mathews and his son T@NE on alto saxophone, and a later Natural Spiritual Orchestra drew in younger players such as the trumpeter Theo Croker and the harpist Brandee Younger. He gave master classes and taught at Oberlin Conservatory, New York University and Long Island University, and into his nineties he hosted long jam sessions at his Fort Greene apartment.

Bill Lee passed away at his Brooklyn home on May 24, 2023, at the age of 94, as Spike Lee announced. Since then the music has kept coming back into print. On April 25, 2025, Mack Avenue Records, which holds the Strata-East license, reissued A Spirit Speaks, Colors and The New York Bass Violin Choir. His estate's label, New Version Music, released The Descendants of Mike and Phoebe II on April 2, 2026, the original score for School Daze on May 19, 2026, and the original score for Mo' Better Blues on May 31, 2026.

Lee's writing joined bebop harmony to church music. A 2008 New York Times review heard the dense chord movement of bebop and hard bop resolving into something plain, earnest and earthy, and that mix runs from the Strata-East records to the film cues. Charlie Parker was the formative influence, and Lee stayed with the acoustic double bass through the electric decades. His arrangements for the bass choir push the instrument into its upper register and into thumb-position playing, so that seven basses behave like a choir with a bottom and a melody. His estate's biography also credits him with a harmonic approach he called the Twelve Resolutions, built on dominant chords drawn from diminished-chord sets, and points to the end of "Straight and Nappy" as an example.

A second thread is the folk revival, where he was a working bassist on other people's records, and a third is film, where his scores mix jazz, gospel and orchestral writing. These are the parts of his career that reach beyond jazz, and the crossover reputation that grew out of them is real, but he was a jazz bassist first, and the Strata-East albums and the bass choir are where his own voice is clearest. Players of later generations kept his tunes in circulation: José James recorded "Nola" on The Dreamer, Russell Malone recorded "Biskit," and Eric Alexander and Gary Smulyan both recorded "Don't Follow the Crowd," while Steve Wilson took up "Be One" on Step Lively (1995).