Ray Anthony was born Raymond Antonini on January 20, 1922, in Bentleyville, Pennsylvania, into an Italian family that soon moved to Cleveland, Ohio. His father gave him a trumpet on his fifth birthday, and he grew up playing in the family's Antonini Family Orchestra. As a teenager he took the trumpeter Harry James as his model, later calling him the greatest of all trumpet players for his complete mastery of the instrument.

He turned professional in 1940 with Al Donahue's orchestra, where he met the singer Dee Keating, who later became his wife. In the same year, at eighteen, he joined Glenn Miller's orchestra, replacing Phil Rommel in the trumpet section, and he appears uncredited in the band's film Sun Valley Serenade (1941). By his own account Miller fired him twice and took him back once because of his playing, and the band nicknamed him "Peck's Bad Boy." He left for good in 1941, spent a few months with Jimmy Dorsey's band, and then enlisted in the Navy in 1942. His service band played at Midway, at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu and on Okinawa, and he has described the Navy years as the time he grew into a bandleader.

After his discharge in 1946 he formed the Ray Anthony Orchestra in Cleveland with former service musicians and local players. He signed with Capitol Records, and the records that carried the band through the early 1950s were dance music in the Miller tradition: "Houseparty Hop," "Trumpet Boogie," "Mr. Anthony's Boogie" and "Thunderbird," all of them credited to him as a writer or co-writer. The hits came quickly. His recording of "At Last" (Capitol 1912, January 1952) reached No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart, the highest-placed American pop version of the song. "The Bunny Hop," co-written by Anthony and released in 1952, reached No. 13 on Billboard and helped set off a dance craze, followed by "The Hokey Pokey." In 1953 his orchestra recorded the theme from the radio and television series Dragnet (Capitol 2562), composed by Walter Schumann, which reached the top three on Billboard and No. 7 in Britain. The drummer Mel Lewis worked in the band in 1949 and 1950 and again in 1953 and 1954, and the vocalists on the records included Ronnie Deauville and Jo Ann Greer.

Television and film followed the records. In summer 1953 the orchestra was featured on the summer replacement program for Perry Como's CBS show, and from 1953 to 1954 Anthony was musical director of the series TV's Top Tunes. His band appeared in Daddy Long Legs (1955) with Fred Astaire and in The Girl Can't Help It (1956), his own The Ray Anthony Show ran in 1956 and 1957, and his orchestra recorded the score for This Could Be the Night (1957). He took acting roles too, including High School Confidential! (1958), The Five Pennies (1959), in which he played Jimmy Dorsey, and Girls Town and The Beat Generation (both 1959). On August 29, 1955, in Toledo, Ohio, he married the actress Mamie Van Doren; their son Perry Ray was born in 1956, and the couple divorced in 1961. A Down Beat cover dated September 10, 1952 pictured him with Marilyn Monroe, and in later interviews he has spoken of friendships with Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman and Hugh Hefner.

His biggest later hit came from television. In 1959 he recorded the "Peter Gunn" theme for Capitol, arranged by Henry Mancini and featuring the tenor saxophonist Plas Johnson, and it reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. His 1962 recording of "Worried Mind" reached No. 20 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart, and he followed the fashions of the early 1960s with twist and swim records, some of them credited to Ray Anthony and His Bookends. By the later 1960s his output ran to country material, film and television themes and easy-listening arrangements. In later decades he released dance and nostalgia albums on his own Aero Space label, including the Dream Dancing series, and in the early 1980s he fronted a band billed as his Big Band of the '80s. He played the Presidential Inaugural Ball in 1985 and toured the United States with big bands until he retired in 1998.

He turned 100 on January 20, 2022, and 104 on January 20, 2026. Since 2013, when the bassist Trigger Alpert died, he has been the last living member of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and he is listed as the oldest living recorded musician. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Anthony is best understood as a dance-band leader and popular entertainer who worked with jazz players and jazz arrangements, not as a jazz soloist or a bebop-era innovator. His band worked in the dance-band mainstream he had learned in Miller's trumpet section, and the records that sold were dance novelties, ballads, film and television themes and, in the 1960s, twist and country covers. Critics writing from the jazz side have often called the results a diluted, popular version of jazz, while Wikipedia counts him among the more modern big-band leaders of his time. Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia includes him, and Wikipedia's categories file him with American jazz bandleaders and trumpeters.

The jazz content is real but concentrated in particular records. Big Band Dixieland (1955) took a full orchestra through "West End Blues," "Basin Street Blues" and "Tin Roof Blues," and Jam Session at the Tower (1956) was cut in Hollywood in February and March 1956 with studio and big-band veterans including Georgie Auld, Med Flory, Conrad Gozzo and Alvin Stoller. His I Remember Glenn Miller set paid direct tribute to his old employer, and a later CD collected his arrangements by George Williams from 1950 to 1955. For models he looked to Glenn Miller's band and Harry James's trumpet playing, and Stan Kenton and Frank Sinatra were Capitol labelmates whose records sat beside his in the catalog.