Percy Heath was born on April 30, 1923, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and grew up in Philadelphia. His father played clarinet and his mother sang in the church choir. He started on violin at eight and sang locally as a boy. He was drafted into the Army in 1944 and trained with the Tuskegee Airmen, graduating as a second lieutenant pilot, but the war ended before he saw combat. Afterward he decided on music, bought an upright bass and enrolled at the Granoff School of Music in Philadelphia, and within a short time he was working the city's jazz clubs. He was the eldest of three brothers who became professional musicians: the saxophonist Jimmy Heath was the middle one and the drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath the youngest.

By 1947 Heath and his brother Jimmy were touring in trumpeter Howard McGhee's sextet, and in 1948 the group appeared at the first international jazz festival in Paris. That year he also recorded in Chicago with Jimmy, as members of McGhee's sextet, on an album led by vibraphonist Milt Jackson. The brothers moved to New York in the late 1940s, where Percy played in the groups of Dizzy Gillespie, with whom he worked from 1950 to 1952, and in the rhythm-and-blues band of Joe Morris, which at the time also carried Johnny Griffin. Early sessions put him with Stan Getz (Prestige quartet dates of 1949 and 1950), with Miles Davis on a Blue Note date of April 20, 1953 that also included Jimmy Heath and J.J. Johnson, and with Clifford Brown on Brown's Blue Note debut New Star on the Horizon in June 1953. AllMusic reports that after he joined the Modern Jazz Quartet he studied with Charles Mingus to firm up his intonation.

The Modern Jazz Quartet grew out of Gillespie's band, where pianist John Lewis, Milt Jackson, drummer Kenny Clarke and bassist Ray Brown played their own short sets while the horns rested. When Brown left to join Ella Fitzgerald's band, Heath took the bass chair, and the group, incorporated in January 1952, recorded for Prestige from December of that year. Clarke left in January 1955 and was replaced by Connie Kay, a lineup that held together for nearly two decades, through the Atlantic years from 1956 and albums such as Fontessa, Pyramid, The Comedy and Blues on Bach. The quartet disbanded in 1974 after The Last Concert, reformed in 1981, when it recorded Reunion at Budokan 1981 in Japan, and last recorded in 1993.

Between and around quartet engagements he was one of the most recorded bassists in jazz, and by his own count he played on about 300 dates over more than 57 years. In 1954 he was Davis's bassist on Prestige sessions that produced Blue Haze, Walkin' and Bags' Groove, the last of which includes the session that paired Davis with Thelonious Monk and Jackson. He also recorded with Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz and Art Farmer, and in January 1960 he anchored the rhythm section, with Albert on drums, on Wes Montgomery's The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery. For Ornette Coleman's Tomorrow Is the Question! (1959) he shared the bass chair with Red Mitchell, and he joined Jimmy on four Riverside albums between 1960 and 1963.

In 1975, while the quartet was inactive, Percy and his two brothers formed the Heath Brothers with pianist Stanley Cowell. Their first album, Marchin' On!, was recorded in Oslo on October 22, 1975, and the group went on to make Columbia and Antilles albums through the mid-1980s and Concord albums in 1997 and 1998. In this setting Percy often played cello, tuned in the intervals of the bass. After Kay's death in 1994, Albert took over the quartet's drum chair. Heath received an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music in 1989 and was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2002.

In 2003, at the age of 80, he made his first album as a leader, A Love Song, for the small Daddy Jazz label, with Albert, bassist Peter Washington and pianist Jeb Patton. He passed away on April 28, 2005, two days short of his 82nd birthday, in Southampton, New York, after a second bout of bone cancer. Bassist William Parker recorded the tribute album For Percy Heath the following month. An avid surfcaster for striped bass off Montauk Point, where he kept a fishing boat he called The Fiddler, Heath was survived by his wife, June, and three sons; a memorial plaque was set into a boulder at Montauk's Turtle Cove on May 27, 2006.

AllMusic calls Heath's bass the cornerstone of the Modern Jazz Quartet for more than four decades and describes his playing there as elegant and restrained, a quiet foundation under John Lewis's piano and Milt Jackson's vibraphone in music that leaned on fugal and chamber-music structures. On his freelance dates for Prestige, Blue Note and Riverside the same source finds him more dynamic and propulsive, driving the hard-bop rhythm sections behind Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Wes Montgomery. AllMusic names Ray Brown, whose chair he inherited in the quartet, as his primary influence. The cello, retuned to bass intervals and used in the Heath Brothers, gave the family band a second, higher voice. His one album as a leader came late, but the sideman credits, running from Howard McGhee's 1948 sextet to Dexter Gordon's Gotham City (1981), cover most of the small-group history of postwar jazz.