James Melvin Lunceford was born June 6, 1902, on a farm in the Evergreen community outside Fulton, Mississippi. His family moved to Oklahoma City within the year and later settled in Denver, where Lunceford attended high school and studied music under Wilberforce J. Whiteman, father of bandleader Paul Whiteman. He learned multiple instruments as a boy, and in 1922 he played alto saxophone in bandleader George Morrison's Denver orchestra alongside a young Andy Kirk. That year he also enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, where he studied sociology and music, lettered in several sports, and played in a campus dance band.

In 1926 Lunceford took a job at Manassas High School in Memphis, Tennessee, as an athletic coach and language instructor, and the following year he founded, equipped, and trained the school's first band, naming it the Chickasaw Syncopators after a local neighborhood. He is often credited as the first person to teach jazz within a public school system, and his student band cut its first sides for Columbia in 1927 before the group turned fully professional around 1929. Recording as "Jimmie Lunceford and His Chickasaw Syncopators," the band waxed "In Dat Mornin'" and "Sweet Rhythm" for Victor in 1930, and Lunceford steadily rebuilt the group with Memphis-trained players as it moved toward full-time touring.

The band's defining sound took shape after trumpeter Sy Oliver joined as chief arranger in 1933. Oliver's scores, built around clipped, syncopated phrasing that became known as the "Lunceford two-beat," subordinated solo improvisation to ensemble precision, unison vocal novelty choruses, and sly humor, and the approach set a new standard for dance-band arranging. Altoist Willie Smith anchored a saxophone section prized for its blend, pianist Eddie Wilcox doubled as a second arranger, and the rest of the working core included trombonist/vocalist Trummy Young, tenor saxophonist/vocalist Joe Thomas, guitarist Al Norris, bassist Moses Allen, and drummer Jimmy Crawford. The band cut a batch of sides for Victor in early 1934, including "Jazznocracy," "White Heat," and "Sophisticated Lady," before signing with the newly formed Decca Records later that year and recording "Rhythm Is Our Business" (Decca 369), which became its signature theme song.

Decca releases through the mid-1930s built the orchestra into one of the top attractions of the swing era, on a commercial and critical footing that contemporaries rated alongside Duke Ellington's, Earl Hines's, and Count Basie's big bands. A 1934 booking into Harlem's Cotton Club for the "Cotton Club Parade" revue raised the group's national profile, and hits followed steadily: "My Blue Heaven" and "Stomp It Off" (1936), "Organ Grinder's Swing" (1936), "For Dancers Only" (1937), "Margie" (1938), and the Trummy Young vocal feature "'Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)" (1939). The band toured Europe extensively in 1937 and had a second tour booked for 1939 that was cancelled with the outbreak of World War II. Onstage the group was as celebrated for its visual production as its music: trumpeters and saxophonists tossed and caught their horns in choreographed unison, singers stepped out for glee-club-style vocal groups (billed as the Lunceford Trio, Quartet, or Glee Club), and the whole show closed with drilled, synchronized bows. Lunceford summed up the philosophy directly: a band that looks good and enjoys its own work, he said, earns a return booking. That same combination of polish and showmanship was widely imitated by other leaders, Glenn Miller among them.

The band recorded for Vocalion, then a Columbia subsidiary, from 1938 to 1940, cutting "Uptown Blues" (1940) among other sides, before Columbia dropped the group as sales slipped; Decca picked the band back up, and it recorded "Blues in the Night" in 1942, the year the orchestra also appeared on screen performing the tune. Underneath the hits, the band was losing ground: Sy Oliver left for Tommy Dorsey's orchestra before the scrapped 1939 European tour, and Lunceford's habit of paying his sidemen modest fixed salaries, while it kept the band financially disciplined, drove a steady stream of players toward better-paying rivals through the 1940s.

On July 12, 1947, while on tour in Oregon, Lunceford collapsed during an in-store autograph session in Seaside ahead of a scheduled performance at the Bungalow dance hall and died en route to the hospital; an autopsy in nearby Astoria attributed the cause to coronary occlusion. He was 45. Unsubstantiated rumors of poisoning by a local restaurant owner circulated at the time but were never supported by evidence. He was buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. Pianist Eddie Wilcox and tenor saxophonist Joe Thomas co-led the orchestra under Lunceford's name through 1948 and 1949 before it finally disbanded.

Lunceford never soloed or sang on his own records and left the writing largely to others, but the band that carried his name was unmistakable: a disciplined ensemble machine built on Sy Oliver's arrangements, prizing blend, dynamics, and the "two-beat" rhythmic snap over improvised solos, wrapped in vaudeville-grade showmanship rare among big bands of the era. Critics and fellow musicians ranked the orchestra with Ellington's and Basie's as one of the three or four most important big bands of the swing era, and its visual routines, drilled horn tosses, dance steps, synchronized bows, were widely copied, with Glenn Miller's organization among the most direct beneficiaries of the "Lunceford sound" and stagecraft. As an educator turned bandleader, Lunceford brought a schoolteacher's insistence on precision and professionalism to a genre that, in most other hands, foregrounded the individual soloist.