Lionel Leo Hampton was born April 20, 1908, in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised primarily in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Chicago, where he received his first musical training. His career began behind the drums, playing in a newsboys' band sponsored by the Chicago Defender. In 1928 he moved west to California, joining the Paul Howard Orchestra before working with bandleader Eddie Barefield and, soon after, Les Hite's band.

In 1929 Hampton took up the vibraphone — an instrument only recently invented — while playing drums in the Hite band, which was at the time fronted by Louis Armstrong on a West Coast residency. On October 16, 1930, during a Armstrong session for "Memories of You," a vibraphone happened to be sitting in the studio; Hampton, eager to show Armstrong what he could do on it, was given the number, and the resulting recording became jazz's first appearance of the vibraphone as a solo voice. It launched Hampton's decades-long project of establishing the instrument as a serious lead voice in jazz rather than a novelty.

Hampton spent the mid-1930s leading his own West Coast bands before Benny Goodman, on a scouting trip through Los Angeles in 1936, heard him and asked him to join what became the Benny Goodman Quartet alongside pianist Teddy Wilson and drummer Gene Krupa. Wilson had joined Goodman's small group in spring 1936 as its first Black member; Hampton followed that August, making the Quartet two Black musicians and two white musicians performing together in public at a time when racially mixed bandstands were still a rarity in American entertainment. The group's records — "Moonglow," "Dizzy Spells," "Dinah," "Exactly Like You" — became swing-era classics, and its example is widely cited by historians as one of the earliest visible steps toward racial integration in American popular music. Hampton later credited Goodman directly: what Goodman did in those years, he said, "made it possible for Negroes to have their chance in baseball and other fields."

In 1940 Hampton left Goodman to form his own big band, financed and managed by his wife Gladys Riddle Hampton, whom he had married in 1936 and who ran the business side of his career until her death in 1971. The new band scored its defining hit two years later: recorded for Decca on May 26, 1942, "Flying Home" — built around a solo by Hampton's 19-year-old tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet that is now regarded as a founding document of R&B saxophone playing — became the most requested number of Hampton's career and remained his theme song for the next six decades.

The Hampton band that toured behind "Flying Home" and its successors became one of the great finishing schools in jazz history, and by most accounts the longest continuously operating big band the music has produced. Its alumni roster over the decades reads like a survey of jazz's postwar generations: Illinois Jacquet, Dexter Gordon, Cat Anderson, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Johnny Griffin, Art Farmer, Clark Terry, Quincy Jones, Wes Montgomery, and — for a few months in 1947 and 1948 — a young bassist named Charles Mingus, whose feature "Mingus Fingers," recorded with the band that November, was his first significant composition to reach a wide audience; Mingus's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Vocalists who passed through the band included Dinah Washington, Joe Williams, Betty Carter, and, briefly, a teenage Aretha Franklin.

Hampton also worked extensively in small-group settings outside the big band, especially through producer Norman Granz's Verve sessions of the 1950s, which repeatedly paired him with pianist Oscar Peterson, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Buddy Rich — a lineup billed as Hamp's Big Four that became one of the era's most admired small-group jazz units; bassist Ray Brown's own long career, including this collaboration, is covered separately in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Hampton kept his own big band working through the 1960s and beyond, periodically reconvening its most famous alumni for reunion dates such as 1968's Newport Uproar!, and remained an active bandleader and recording artist into his eighties, fronting all-star late-career dates like 1991's Live at the Blue Note with pianist Hank Jones, trumpeters Clark Terry and Harry "Sweets" Edison, and other swing- and bebop-era veterans billed as the Golden Men of Jazz.

Beyond music, Hampton was an active civic and political figure: a lifelong Republican who campaigned for and befriended a succession of presidents, he founded the Lionel Hampton Development Corporation to build low-income housing, including the Lionel Hampton Houses that still stand in Harlem. His honors accumulated accordingly — a 1988 NEA Jazz Masters fellowship, Kennedy Center Honors in 1992, the National Medal of Arts (awarded in 1996, presented at a White House ceremony on January 10, 1997), and, over his lifetime, some fifteen honorary doctorates. The University of Idaho's student jazz festival, which Hampton began supporting in 1984, was renamed the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in his honor the following year and today houses the Lionel Hampton School of Music.

In January 1997, just two days before that White House ceremony, a fire tore through Hampton's 28th-floor Manhattan apartment at Lincoln Plaza, destroying nearly everything he owned, including much of his band's arrangement library; Hampton, then 88 and using a wheelchair, was evacuated unhurt by an assistant, and reportedly had to borrow a suit to accept his medal from President Clinton two days later. He continued performing in the years that followed despite declining health. Hampton died August 31, 2002, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, of congestive heart failure — five years after the fire, not because of it — at age 94. The Recording Academy awarded him a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021.

Hampton essentially defined the vibraphone as a serious jazz instrument, translating a drummer's rhythmic attack and a showman's exuberance onto mallets in a way no one had before him. His playing was built for momentum — two-mallet runs delivered with the drive of a big-band drummer, framed by call-and-response riffing and crowd-pleasing showmanship (he was known to play with his fists, and to abandon the vibraphone mid-tune for drums or piano). Sustained across more than five decades of bandleading, that combination of rhythmic force and instinct for a hook made his orchestra one of jazz's most consequential proving grounds, a bridge that carried players from the swing era through bebop and into the postwar mainstream.