Raymundo Barretto Pagán was born in Brooklyn on April 29, 1929, to parents who had come to New York from Puerto Rico in the early 1920s. His father left the family when he was four, and his mother, Delores, moved them to Spanish Harlem and then, when he was seven, to the Bronx. Puerto Rican music filled the house, along with his mother's liking for the swing bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. In 1946, at seventeen, he joined the Army.

Stationed in Germany, Barretto heard Dizzy Gillespie's recording of "Manteca," made with the Cuban conga drummer Chano Pozo, and decided that music was his calling. He sat in at jam sessions at the Orlando, a G.I. jazz club in Munich, and in Germany he also met the Belgian vibraphonist Fats Sadi. Back in Harlem in 1949 he taught himself the conga drums at jam sessions, took his first regular job with Eddie Bonnemere's Latin Jazz Combo, and then spent four years with the Cuban pianist and bandleader José Curbelo. In 1957 he replaced Mongo Santamaría in Tito Puente's band, and his first recording credit, Dance Mania, dates from 1958. Accounts of the New York jam-session circuit of those years place him on the same stands as Max Roach, Art Blakey and Charlie Parker.

By 1960 Barretto was the house conga player for Prestige, Blue Note and Riverside, and he is often credited as the first U.S.-born percussionist to bring the conga into jazz as a regular chair. The records show it. He is on Lou Donaldson's Swing and Soul (1957) and Blues Walk, cut July 28, 1958; Red Garland's Manteca (1958); Gene Ammons's Boss Tenor, recorded June 16, 1960; Wes Montgomery's So Much Guitar! (1961), on five of its eight tracks; Dizzy Gillespie's big-band Carnegie Hall Concert (March 4, 1961); Cannonball Adderley's orchestra album African Waltz (1961); and Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue, recorded January 8, 1963 with Stanley Turrentine, a Blue Note date that critics often rank among the finest jazz albums. Herbie Mann, Cal Tjader, Eddie Harris and Yusef Lateef also used him, and he played on Freddie Hubbard's Backlash (1967) and Sky Dive (1972).

His first job as a leader came in 1961, when the Riverside producer Orrin Keepnews, who knew his jazz work, asked him to form a charanga, the flute-and-violin dance ensemble of Cuban tradition, for a record. The result was Pachanga With Barretto, followed by Latino! in 1962. That same year he made Charanga Moderna for Tico, which contained "El Watusi." The record was a dance-craze novelty hit that reached the Billboard Top 20 in 1963 (number 17 on the pop chart) and went gold; it is called the most successful pachanga record in the United States, and Barretto disliked being typecast by it. In 1965 he moved to the Latin division of United Artists, UA Latino, for four albums that blended R&B with Latin rhythms in the boogaloo style, among them El Ray Criollo (1966), a mix of charanga and conjunto sounds that pointed toward what would later be called salsa.

He signed with Fania in 1967. His first album for the label, Acid (1968), with Adalberto Santiago singing, became one of the most durable boogaloo records, and its "A Deeper Shade of Soul" was sampled in a 1991 Hot 100 hit by the Dutch band Urban Dance Squad. Hard Hands, Together, Barretto Power (1970), The Message (1971) and Que Viva la Música (1972) followed. "Cocinando," from the last of them, opened the soundtrack of the Fania All-Stars film Our Latin Thing (1972), in which Barretto appeared, and he became a long-time member of the All-Stars and, for a stretch, its musical director. Most of his band, Santiago included, left to form Típica 73, and Indestructible (1973) was recorded with a new singer, Tito Allen. The departures left Barretto discouraged about salsa, and he turned part of his attention to jazz, most clearly on The Other Road (1973), which has Billy Cobham on drums. The 1975 album Barretto, with the new vocalists Rubén Blades and Tito Gómez, brought a Grammy nomination, and its song "Guararé" was a hit.

From 1976 to 1978 he made three albums for Atlantic. Tomorrow: Barretto Live, recorded at the Beacon Theatre in New York on May 28, 1976, was Grammy-nominated; Eye of the Beholder (1977) was produced by members of The Crusaders; and Can You Feel It (1978) kept the electric, fusion-minded concert band going. He then recorded La Cuna for CTI in August 1979 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with Tito Puente, Charlie Palmieri, Joe Farrell and Steve Gadd among the players, and returned to Fania for Rican/Struction (1979), a salsa record that Latin N.Y. magazine named Best Album of 1980, the year it also crowned him Conga Player of the Year. In 1985 he took part in the anti-apartheid Sun City recording. Ritmo en el Corazón (1988), made with Celia Cruz and Adalberto Santiago, won the Grammy for Best Tropical Latin Performance at the 32nd annual awards in 1990, his only win.

He was part of the Latin Legends of Fania, a salsa reunion package, until 1992, when he left to concentrate on a new Latin jazz sextet, New World Spirit. The band made Ancestral Messages (1993) and Taboo (1994) for Concord Picante, then My Summertime (1995) and Contact! (1998, nominated for the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Performance) for Blue Note, and Portraits in Jazz and Clave (1999) for RCA Victor, with Kenny Burrell, Eddie Gómez, Joe Lovano and Steve Turré as guests. Satoshi Takeishi is the drummer on Ancestral Messages, Michael Philip Mossman plays trumpet, trombone and flugelhorn on My Summertime and Contact!, and James Moody joined the band on Trancedance (2001). He also made a sextet tribute, Homage to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (2002), and the Grammy-nominated Time Was, Time Is (2005).

Barretto was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 1999, was voted jazz percussionist of 2004 by the Jazz Journalists Association, and won the DownBeat critics' poll for percussion in 2005. In 2006 he was named an NEA Jazz Master. He lived in northern New Jersey and toured the United States, Africa, Europe, Israel and Latin America with his own band. Barretto passed away at Hackensack University Medical Center on February 17, 2006, at 76, of heart failure and complications of other health problems; he was a resident of Norwood. His body was flown to Puerto Rico, where the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture gave him formal honors. His last album, Standards Rican-ditioned, appeared on the Zoho label later that year, with his son Chris Barretto on alto saxophone.

Most of Barretto's public career is not jazz in the strict sense, and it is stated plainly here. His own records on Tico, UA Latino and Fania are pachanga, boogaloo, son, charanga and salsa dance music for Latin New York, with one dance-craze novelty hit, "El Watusi," that he did not enjoy being known for; he also played congas on rock and pop sessions, among them dates for the Bee Gees and the Rolling Stones. What ties that body of work to jazz is where he started. AllMusic's Richard S. Ginell notes that he came to Latin music from jazz rather than the other way round and learned swing time before he mastered Latin grooves, and his session credits bear that out: Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Verve, Atlantic and CTI dates across two decades. He was a master of the descarga, the improvised Latin jam session, and his bands tended to carry a tenser, more experimental edge than conventional salsa groups, with electronics and unusual instrumental combinations.

He credited Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca," with Chano Pozo's conga, for his decision to become a musician, and he grew up on Ellington and Basie records. New World Spirit played Latin-flavored versions of standards by Ellington and others next to originals, and press reports noted that Barretto himself disliked the label "Latin jazz." The conga player Little Johnny Rivero names him among his influences, and the drummer Satoshi Takeishi spent a period in New World Spirit.