Mickey "Guitar" Baker was born McHouston Baker in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 15, 1925. His mother was a young single woman named Lillian Smith, and he grew up in institutions. In 1936, at eleven, he was placed in an orphanage and ran away so often that the staff eventually stopped looking for him. By sixteen he had settled in New York City, where he worked as a laborer and dishwasher and spent much of his time in the pool halls of West 26th Street. At nineteen he decided to become a jazz musician. The trumpet was his first choice, but the fourteen dollars he had saved bought nothing in a pawnshop except a guitar. After a short, frustrating stretch at the New York School of Music he took private lessons from a series of teachers over the next few years, and his style was shaped by Charlie Parker as much as by any guitarist.

By 1949 he led his own combo and had a few paying jobs, and he went west expecting to find work. California audiences had little appetite for progressive jazz, and he was stranded until he saw the blues guitarist Pee Wee Crayton, who drove a big car and toured with his own bus. The lesson was a practical one. He took blues jobs in Richmond, California, earned enough to get home, and returned to New York, treating the blues, in his own later words, as a financial decision. AllMusic's summary is that he started out wanting to be a jazz player and turned to calypso, mambo and then rhythm and blues, where the work was.

What followed was one of the busiest session careers of the 1950s. He recorded for Atlantic, Savoy, King, RCA, Decca and OKeh, and worked with Doc Pomus, Ray Charles, Ivory Joe Hunter, Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Coleman Hawkins, Dion and the Drifters, among many others. AllMusic points to the Drifters' "Money Honey" and "Such a Night," Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle & Roll," Ruth Brown's "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" and Big Maybelle's "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" as his best-known sessions, and he is also on LaVern Baker's "Jim Dandy" and Little Willie John's "Fever." Pop-music historian Jim Dawson called him New York's top rhythm-and-blues session guitarist of the decade. His teaching ran alongside the playing: in 1955 he published the first volume of Mickey Baker's Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, a self-tuition method that has stayed in print for more than fifty years and that, according to a Frank Zappa biography cited by the Los Angeles Times, taught the young Frank Zappa to play.

One of his guitar students was Sylvia Vanderpool, later Sylvia Robinson. Inspired by the success of Les Paul and Mary Ford, the two formed Mickey & Sylvia, whose first record, "Fine Love," came out on Cat in 1954. Their second session produced "Love Is Strange," built on a Bo Diddley song and recorded with his blessing. Released on Groove in November 1956, it reached No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 11 on the pop chart in January 1957 and sold more than a million copies. Baker's keening, bluesy riffs on it were later admired by Buddy Holly, and film has kept reviving the record, from Dirty Dancing (1987) to Casino. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004.

The duo split in late 1958, and Baker recorded with the singer Kitty Noble as Mickey & Kitty, releasing three records on Atlantic in 1959. In late 1959 Atlantic also issued his first album under his own name, The Wildest Guitar, an all-instrumental set that AllMusic considers his best solo record and that is built largely on standards such as "Autumn Leaves," "Night and Day" and "Old Devil Moon." Mickey & Sylvia reunited in 1960, founded the Willow label in 1961 and recorded sporadically into the mid-1960s. In 1961 Baker also took the spoken male part on Ike & Tina Turner's first hit, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine."

In the 1960s he moved to France, disillusioned with the American music business and with racism, and he stayed for the rest of his life, first in Paris and later near Toulouse. His Paris years were busy and often jazz-flavored. In June 1962 he recorded Mickey Baker Plays Mickey Baker for the Versailles label with a band of Paris players that included drummer Daniel Humair, pianist Georges Arvanitas, trumpeter Roger Guérin and trombonist Nat Peck, and that November he arranged and produced Bossa Nova en Direct du Brésil for the same label, with the Brazilian guitarist Sivuca and bassist Pierre Michelot in the lineup. He backed Colette Magny on "Mélocoton" in 1963, played with Ronnie Bird, Françoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan, and arranged and produced Chantal Goya's records for RCA from 1964 to 1967. He appeared in a scene of Jean-Luc Godard's film Masculin Féminin (1966), in which Goya has a leading role. By the late 1960s he was playing with Memphis Slim and Champion Jack Dupree, and the 1970s brought a run of blues and jazz-rock records for European labels: The Blues and Me (Black & Blue, 1974), recorded in Paris with Jimmy Rogers, Louis Myers and Fred Below, Take a Look Inside (Big Bear, 1975), Blues and Jazz Guitar, an acoustic duo album with Stefan Grossman (Kicking Mule, 1977), and Jazz Rock Guitar (Kicking Mule, 1978). He played the Roskilde Festival in 1975.

Baker kept his private life closely guarded, gave few interviews and rarely left France. He was married six times, and his wife from the early 1980s was the singer Marie France-Drei. The Rhythm and Blues Foundation gave him its Pioneer Award in 1999, and Rolling Stone placed him at No. 53 on its 2003 list of the 100 greatest guitarists. He passed away on November 27, 2012, near Toulouse, at the age of 87, of heart and kidney failure.

Baker's fame rests on rhythm and blues and rock and roll, and AllMusic files him under R&B, pop/rock and blues rather than jazz. The jazz is underneath rather than on top: the harmonic vocabulary of a player who came up on Charlie Parker, and a lasting commitment to jazz education through the Complete Course books. NPR's Tom Cole described him as a jazz musician first, and his own records span the range, from the 1952 single "Guitar Mambo" and the Paris jazz and bossa nova albums of 1962 to the Alex Sanders Funk Time Band jazz-rock albums of the late 1970s. What listeners remember is the sound: a gutsy, piercing, bent-note attack, sharper than most guitar of the late 1950s, that helped carry rhythm and blues over into rock and roll. Jim Dawson heard it in Buddy Holly's "Words of Love," and Dave Marsh called him the first great rock and roll guitarist. Because so much of his work was issued under other people's names, he was never as widely known as Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley, though AllMusic ranks him almost on their level among the guitarists who made that transition.