Cleveland Josephus "Cleve" Eaton was born August 31, 1939, in Fairfield, Alabama. Between the ages of five and fifteen he learned piano, saxophone, trumpet, and tuba before settling on bass, and after earning a music degree at Tennessee A&I State University, he moved to Chicago and joined pianist Ike Cole's trio. In 1965 he began a decade-long stint with the Ramsey Lewis Trio, playing on albums including Wade in the Water (1966), Goin' Latin (1967), and the No. 1 jazz album Sun Goddess (1975), a run that netted the group three Grammys and four gold albums. Ramsey Lewis's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

Eaton left Lewis's band over a salary dispute, and just two weeks later began what became his defining professional relationship: seventeen years with the Count Basie Orchestra, where he was dubbed "the Count's Bassist" across more than ten recordings. Beyond his time with Lewis and Basie, Eaton worked as a first-call sideman for a remarkably broad range of artists, including Ike Cole, Minnie Riperton, the Dells, Julie London, Sammy Davis Jr., Herbie Hancock, and the Temptations, and wrote more than 300 songs across his career. His most notable outing as a leader, 1975's Plenty Good Eaton, remains a touchstone of jazz-funk collector circles.

He was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1979 and the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 2008. Eaton died July 5, 2020, in Birmingham, Alabama, at age 80.

Eaton's career bridges two distinct worlds: the jazz-funk crossover sound he helped define with the Ramsey Lewis Trio in the mid-1960s and '70s, and the classic swing-era big-band tradition he represented for seventeen years as the Count Basie Orchestra's bassist, a combination unusual among the artists profiled on this project.