Victor Lemonte Wooten was born on September 11, 1964, in Mountain Home, Idaho, the youngest of five brothers in an Air Force family that moved often, with years in Hawaii before the family settled in Newport News, Virginia, in 1972. His eldest brother Regi began teaching him bass when he was two, and by six he was playing in the family group, the Wooten Brothers Band, with Regi on guitar, Roy on drums, Rudy on saxophone and Joseph on keyboards. His official biography says the band opened shows for Curtis Mayfield when he was six, and that before he finished high school the brothers had shared stages with War, Ramsey Lewis, Maze and the Temptations. He graduated from Denbigh High School in 1982. In his teens the brothers worked the country-music shows at Busch Gardens Williamsburg, where, by his own account, he took a bluegrass fiddle job in 1981 without ever having played the violin and learned the tunes almost overnight. The family act made a self-titled album as the Wootens for Arista in 1985.

In 1987 he visited Nashville with a friend from the park, a studio engineer who introduced him to the banjoist Béla Fleck, and he was living in the city by 1988. That year Fleck was invited to play on the PBS series The Lonesome Pine Special and put together a band. Wooten auditioned by phone and put forward his brother Roy, who plays a drum controller he calls the Drumitar and performs as Future Man, and the harmonica and piano player Howard Levy completed the group. Fleck kept it together as Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, a band whose mix of jazz, progressive bluegrass, rock, classical and funk is sometimes called "blu-bop." The debut album came out on Warner Bros. on March 6, 1990, and Flight of the Cosmic Hippo (June 1991) reached No. 1 on Billboard's Top Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. Levy left in December 1992, and Fleck and the Wootens carried on as a trio until the saxophonist Jeff Coffin joined in April 1997; Levy returned for Rocket Science (2011). The band announced a hiatus in June 2012, reunited for a tour in 2016 and in August 2017 co-headlined a summer tour with Corea's Elektric Band.

Grammy.com credits Wooten with five wins, every one of them with the Flecktones: Best Pop Instrumental Performance for a live recording of "The Sinister Minister" (1997), Best Instrumental Composition for "Almost 12," which he wrote with Fleck and Roy Wooten (1999), Best Contemporary Jazz Album for Outbound (2001) and The Hidden Land (2007), and Best Pop Instrumental Album for the holiday record Jingle All the Way (2009). The same page lists twelve nominations in all, wins included, among them one for his own Yin-Yang in 2000.

His first album under his own name, A Show of Hands (Compass, February 20, 1996), is a solo bass record with voices as the only accompaniment, and its program runs from Stevie Wonder's "Overjoyed" to a medley of "Someday My Prince Will Come," Erroll Garner's "Misty" and Dizzy Gillespie's "A Night in Tunisia." What Did He Say? (Compass, August 19, 1997) added drummer J.D. Blair and took on John Coltrane's "Naima" and "Cherokee," the latter with James Genus on acoustic bass. The two-disc Yin-Yang (Compass, June 22, 1999) split instrumental pieces from vocal ones and drew in Fleck, Bootsy Collins, drummer Carter Beauford, Kirk Whalum and his brothers. Live in America (2001) and the vocal-heavy Soul Circus (Vanguard, April 12, 2005) followed, then Palmystery (Heads Up, April 1, 2008), which his official biography presents as a showcase for his jazz composing and arranging and which brought in guitarist Mike Stern, drummer Dennis Chambers, Richard Bona on percussion and vocals, saxophonist Karl Denson and Keb' Mo'. Since then his records have come out on his own Vix Records: The Music Lesson (2011), Words & Tones and Sword & Stone (both 2012), and Trypnotyx (September 8, 2017), a trio date with Chambers and the saxophonist Bob Franceschini.

Around the Flecktones he has built a second career in fusion supergroups and as a guest. Vital Tech Tones, a trio with the Tribal Tech guitarist Scott Henderson and the drummer Steve Smith, made two studio albums for Tone Center (1998 and 2000) and never toured. Bass Extremes pairs him with the bassist Steve Bailey on Cookbook (1998), Just Add Water (2001) and S'Low Down (2022). Extraction (Tone Center, October 7, 2003) is a guitar, bass and drums record with Greg Howe and Chambers. The three bassists first played together at a Bass Player magazine concert in New York in 2006, where Marcus Miller and Wooten presented Stanley Clarke with the magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award. The trio became SMV, and its album Thunder (Heads Up, August 12, 2008) was produced by Miller with Clarke and Wooten as co-producers and had Chick Corea and George Duke among its guests. SMV toured the world through 2009.

The jazz-side credits stretch across three decades. He is the bassist on four of Stern's records (These Times, 2003; Who Let the Cats Out?, 2006; All Over the Place, 2012; Trip, 2017). From December 26 to 31, 2007, he was the bassist in Corea's Elektric Band for its run at New York's Blue Note, and in December 2016 he returned to the Blue Note for the close of Corea's 75th-birthday celebration, playing bass with Corea, John McLaughlin and the drummer Lenny White. On saxophonist Dave Liebman's On the Corner Live! (Ear Up, 2019), a reworking of Miles Davis's On the Corner recorded in Nashville on February 6, 2015, he is the electric bassist alongside Coffin. The funk side runs through the Wooten Brothers' 2013 reunion tour and two Bootsy Collins albums, Tha Funk Capital of the World (2011) and World Wide Funk (2017).

In 2000 he started the Bass/Nature camp, which grew into Victor Wooten's Center for Music and Nature and is held at Wooten Woods, a 147-acre retreat in Only, Tennessee; he also co-leads the Berklee Summer Bass Workshop with Bailey, with whom he has taught since the early 1990s. His novel The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music was published by Berkley/Penguin in 2008, and a sequel, The Spirit of Music: The Lesson Continues, followed on February 2, 2021. In 2018 and 2019 he was diagnosed with focal dystonia, a rare neurological condition in his hands and upper body that had been limiting his playing in earlier years. On October 28, 2021, he was the soloist in La Lección Tres, an electric bass concerto he expanded from his 2008 solo piece "The Lesson," with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Wilkins at Symphony Hall, the first time the orchestra had presented a concerto for electric bass in its 141 seasons. On June 26, 2025, he played the Sicilia Jazz Festival at the Teatro di Verdura in Palermo with the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana, conducted by Antonino Pedone. He continues to tour: Victor Wooten and the Wooten Brothers announced a United States fall tour in June 2026, with dates from September through December 20 at Tipitina's in New Orleans.

Wooten's bass is a funk bass first, built on slap technique and a hammer-and-pluck approach of his own that lets one instrument carry melody, accompaniment and percussion at once, which is why a record like A Show of Hands works with nothing but bass and voices. The jazz comes through the harmony and the improvising, on fretted and fretless electric basses (mostly Fodera, which makes a signature model for him), on double bass, and occasionally on cello, and through a repertoire that takes in Coltrane, Gillespie and Miles Davis next to his own tunes. He has named Jaco Pastorius as the player who changed his life, and his published list of influences also includes Larry Graham, Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, James Jamerson, Bootsy Collins, Paul McCartney, Chuck Rainey, John Entwistle, Ray Brown and Ron Carter.

The context he works in is wider than jazz, and it helps to say so plainly. The Flecktones came up through jazz festivals and bluegrass festivals and drew a jam-band following, opening for the Dave Matthews Band in 1997 and sitting in with Phish, and AllMusic files him under Crossover Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Fusion and Jazz-Funk as well as Bluegrass and Progressive Bluegrass. His own records lean into soul, R&B, rap and gospel more than into bebop, and the Wooten Brothers are a funk and soul family band. What anchors him in jazz is the company he keeps and the awards he wins in the category: two Grammys for Best Contemporary Jazz Album, a nomination for Yin-Yang in Best Contemporary Jazz Performance, the Corea and Stern years, the trio with Clarke and Miller, and a Boston Symphony concerto. Bass Player readers named him Bassist of the Year three times, the only winner to take the award more than once according to his own biography, and in 2011 Rolling Stone readers ranked him No. 10 among the greatest bassists of all time. Teaching is a second career: the camps, the Berklee workshop and two books all treat music as a language to be absorbed by ear and by feel before it is analyzed.