Louis Sedell Hayes was born May 31, 1937, in Detroit, Michigan. His father was an autoworker who also played drums and piano; his mother, a waitress and pianist, was the sister of John L. Nelson, the father of the musician Prince, making Hayes a first cousin of Prince's. Hayes got his first drum kit at ten, and his cousin Clarence Stamps, an established drummer, gave him early informal lessons. He named Philly Joe Jones as his main early influence and later received guidance from Jo Jones. He was leading his own band in Detroit clubs before he turned sixteen, and in 1955 and 1956 he worked around the city with Yusef Lateef and Curtis Fuller.

In August 1956 Hayes moved to New York to replace Art Taylor in the Horace Silver Quintet, his first major professional association. He stayed with Silver through 1959, appearing on Further Explorations (1958, Blue Note) with Art Farmer and Clifford Jordan, and Blowin' the Blues Away (1959, Blue Note) with Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook. In the same period he built a busy freelance sideman schedule around New York, including the 1958 Van Gelder Studio session issued as Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane (with Paul Chambers and Tommy Flanagan), and a one-off studio pairing with pianist Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane (billed pseudonymously as "The Blue Train" for contractual reasons) and Kenny Dorham, released on United Artists as Hard Driving Jazz, later reissued as Coltrane Time and Stereo Drive (1958).

Hayes joined the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1959 and remained until mid-1965, the longest single tenure of his career and the association most identified with him. He is on The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco (1959) and Them Dirty Blues (1960), both for Riverside with pianist Bobby Timmons, and on the Sextet's Nippon Soul (1963, recorded live in Japan) alongside Yusef Lateef and pianist Joe Zawinul. During this stretch Vee-Jay Records issued Hayes's debut as a leader, Louis Hayes (1960), essentially the Adderley band with Cannonball absent: Nat Adderley on cornet, Barry Harris on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Yusef Lateef subbing on tenor saxophone. In 1961 Hayes also sat in the drum chair for the jointly billed Bethlehem session Motor City Scene, credited to Pepper Adams, Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan, and Paul Chambers alongside him.

In 1965 Hayes succeeded Ed Thigpen in the Oscar Peterson Trio alongside bassist Ray Brown, left in 1967, and returned to Peterson in 1971; he was also McCoy Tyner's trio drummer for more than three years, work documented on Tyner's Bon Voyage (1987, Timeless) and on a 1986 Hamburg concert with Freddie Hubbard issued decades later as Live at Fabrik, Hamburg 1986. In 1972 Hayes formed his own Louis Hayes Sextet, which by 1975 had become the co-led Louis Hayes-Junior Cook Quintet and, with the addition of trumpeter Woody Shaw, the Louis Hayes-Woody Shaw Quintet. That band's studio and archival live records, Ichi-Ban (1976, Timeless), The Real Thing (1978, Muse, with Slide Hampton guesting), Lausanne 1977 (recorded live in Switzerland, issued 1997 on TCB), and the posthumously assembled The Tour, Volumes One and Two (2016 and 2017, HighNote), remain some of the most acclaimed hard bop of the era. Hayes also led the 1977 Xanadu sessions True Blue and Silver Blue, all-star dates jointly billed to Al Cohn, Dexter Gordon, Barry Harris, Sam Jones, Blue Mitchell, and Sam Noto. Shaw left the band in 1977, and Hayes continued leading it as a working hard-bop unit.

Since 1989 Hayes has led his own group continuously, recording a steady run of SteepleChase and TCB albums through the 1990s, Light and Lively (1989, with Charles Tolliver and Bobby Watson), Nightfall (1991), Louis At Large (1996), Quintessential Lou (1999), and The Candy Man (2001), before forming the Cannonball Legacy Band, a working tribute to his old employer, for Dreamin' of Cannonball (2002, with Vincent Herring and Jeremy Pelt) and Maximum Firepower (2006). His most recent quintet, with tenor saxophonist Abraham Burton, vibraphonist Steve Nelson, and bassist Dezron Douglas, has recorded Return of the Jazz Communicators (2014, Smoke Sessions), Serenade for Horace (2017, Blue Note, a tribute to Horace Silver), Crisis (2021, Savant), and Artform Revisited (2024, Savant). He was named to the National Endowment for the Arts' 2023 class of NEA Jazz Masters and, into his late eighties, remains an active touring and recording bandleader.

Hayes is a hard-driving, economical timekeeper whose playing helped define the sound of hard bop as it moved out of Detroit and into New York in the mid-1950s. Drawing on Philly Joe Jones's crackling snare-and-cymbal language and later refined by direct contact with Jo Jones, he built a style built on propulsive, uncluttered time and sharp, well-placed accents rather than extended soloing, ideally suited to the churning gospel-and-blues-inflected hard bop of Horace Silver and Cannonball Adderley, and durable enough to anchor everything from Oscar Peterson's trio to his own straight-ahead working bands across seven decades. Unlike many contemporaries, Hayes never significantly altered his musical language to chase free jazz or fusion; critics and historians instead credit him with keeping the hard-bop and post-bop small-group tradition alive and commercially viable from the 1970s onward, a consistency formally recognized with his selection as an NEA Jazz Master in 2023.