Etta Jones was born on November 25, 1928, in Aiken, South Carolina, and was raised in Harlem, New York. Her parents had named her after another Etta Jones, a member of the Dandridge Sisters. As a small child she sang in front of a mirror to the radio, copying Thelma Carpenter and Billie Holiday, and she saw Holiday perform in person while still a girl. At fifteen she entered amateur night at the Apollo Theater, lost her nerve, and did not win, but the bandleader Buddy Johnson, who was at the piano that night, hired her anyway to fill in for his sister, the singer Ella Johnson, who was leaving the band to have a baby. Jones toured with Johnson's nineteen-piece orchestra for about a year, until his sister returned.

She then sang with the Harlemaires and with Barney Bigard's orchestra. Her first records date from 1944, when the critic and pianist Leonard Feather produced a session with Bigard on clarinet and Georgie Auld and Joe Thomas in the band: "Salty Papa Blues," "Evil Gal Blues," "Blow Top Blues" and "Long, Long Journey," issued on the Black & White label, with the "Blow Top Blues" and "Salty Papa Blues" coupling appearing in June 1945. Sides followed with the pianist Cyril Haynes's quartet (1945), Pete Johnson's All-Stars (1946) and the drummer J.C. Heard's band, and according to Heard's profile she and Sarah Vaughan fronted his combo at Café Society Downtown in 1946 and 1947. In 1947 she cut "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman" for RCA Victor with Heard's band, an early cover of a song first recorded by the Basin Street Boys. From 1949 to 1952 she sang with the Earl Hines sextet. The rest of the 1950s were lean: a 1955 single for Jubilee brought no breakthrough, she took work as a seamstress, an elevator operator and a stuffer of record albums, and she sang only occasionally. A King Records album with a group led by the pianist Don Abney, The Jones Girl... Etta... Sings, Sings, Sings (issued in 1958), drew little notice.

In 1960 a demo tape reached Esmond Edwards at Prestige Records, and he signed her. Her first Prestige session, on June 21, 1960, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, produced Don't Go to Strangers with Frank Wess on flute and tenor saxophone, Richard Wyands on piano, Skeeter Best on guitar, George Duvivier on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. The title song reached number 5 on the rhythm and blues chart and number 36 on the pop chart, and the single is reported to have sold about a million copies. Prestige followed it with Something Nice (1961), So Warm (1961, a set with strings arranged and conducted by Oliver Nelson), From the Heart (1962, again with Nelson), Lonely and Blue (1962), Love Shout and Hollar! (both 1963), and on April 13, 1962, she sang three numbers on Gene Ammons's Soul Summit Vol. 2. Her sidemen on these dates included Wess, Haynes, Duvivier, Wyands, Nelson, the vibraphonist Lem Winchester, the tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson, and Kenny Burrell on one track of Hollar!. In 1965 she made Etta Jones Sings for Roulette, with Junior Mance on piano, Burrell on guitar, Wess, the trumpeter Joe Newman, bassist Milt Hinton and Mike Mainieri on vibraphone, produced by Henry Glover.

The later 1960s brought few records. She kept working with bands and in clubs and, in January and February 1970, toured Japan as the singer with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, a lineup that also included the tenor saxophonist Carlos Garnett and the pianist Joanne Brackeen. In 1968 she had met the tenor saxophonist Houston Person; accounts differ on whether they first worked together in the organist Johnny Hammond Smith's band or on the same bill at a Washington, D.C., nightclub. They became a duo with equal billing and stayed one for more than three decades. From about 1975 Person was also her manager and record producer, and he played on and produced almost everything she made afterward. Many people took him for her husband, which he was not; her husband was John Medlock. Person is a soloist on her Westbound album Etta Jones '75 (1975), and in December 1976 they began a long run for the Muse label with Ms. Jones to You.

Muse and its successor HighNote issued about eighteen of her albums between 1976 and 2001. Among them were My Mother's Eyes (recorded June 23, 1977), If You Could See Me Now (1979), Save Your Love for Me (recorded July 8, 1980, with Cedar Walton, Duvivier, drummer Frankie Jones and Person), Love Me with All Your Heart (1984, with Jimmy Cobb on drums), Fine and Mellow (1987), I'll Be Seeing You (1988), Sugar (1990), Reverse the Charges (1992, with Benny Green and Christian McBride), At Last (1995) and My Gentleman Friend (1996). On HighNote she recorded The Melody Lingers On (1997, a set of songs associated with departed entertainers), My Buddy (recorded December 11, 1997, released May 19, 1998), a tribute to Buddy Johnson, All the Way (1999, songs of Sammy Cahn), Easy Living (2000) and Together at Christmas (2000, shared with Person). She also sang on Milt Jackson's Sa Va Bella (For Lady Legends) (1997) and, with Ray Brown's trio, on two tracks of Some of My Best Friends Are...Singers (1998), and she appeared with pianist Billy Taylor at Town Hall and with Illinois Jacquet at Carnegie Hall. By one account she and Person played up to two hundred dates a year.

Jones was treated for cancer for more than a decade and kept performing until her health failed. She passed away on October 16, 2001, in Mount Vernon, New York, at age 72. Her last album, Etta Jones Sings Lady Day, a tribute to Billie Holiday recorded on June 21, 2001, with Person, Wyands, Peter Bernstein, bassist John Webber and drummer Chip White, was released the same day. She was survived by her husband, two sisters and a granddaughter; her daughter had died earlier. Her honors include the Eubie Blake Jazz Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women in Jazz Foundation. The Recording Academy lists three Grammy nominations: Save Your Love for Me (1982 ceremony), My Buddy (1999) and Etta Jones Sings Lady Day (2003). Don't Go to Strangers was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008. Later releases drew on live tapes, among them Don't Misunderstand: Live in New York (recorded at Salt Peanuts in 1980, issued 2007), The Way We Were: Live in Concert (2011) and A Soulful Sunday: Live at the Left Bank (a 1972 Baltimore set with the Cedar Walton Trio, issued in 2018).

Jones sang standards in a warm, unhurried voice and favored straightforward, sincere readings, with an improvisatory phrasing that, as one obituary put it, drew at least as much on horn players as on other singers. Her early models were Thelma Carpenter, a singer with the Count Basie Orchestra, and Billie Holiday, whose sensitivity of phrasing she shared (she was said to do remarkable private impressions of Holiday); the harder, blues-rooted side of her singing came from Dinah Washington. Her repertoire leaned on the Great American Songbook, with Sammy Cahn a favorite writer alongside Harold Arlen, the Gershwins and Cole Porter. A DownBeat reviewer of Don't Go to Strangers praised her as a real jazz singer with an identity of her own despite the resemblance to Holiday, and Houston Person's tenor saxophone, answering her phrases and leaving her space, became the signature setting of her later records; she said he always knew what she would do next. She is a different artist from the rhythm and blues singer Etta James, with whom she is often confused.