Roy Owen Haynes was born on March 13, 1925 in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, to Gustavas and Edna Haynes, immigrants from Barbados. His younger brother Michael E. Haynes became a civil rights leader in Massachusetts, worked with Martin Luther King Jr., served in the state House of Representatives and spent forty years as pastor of Boston's Twelfth Baptist Church. Haynes made his professional debut in Boston in 1942, working locally with Sabby Lewis, Frankie Newton and Pete Brown. The break came in the summer of 1945, when he was playing on Martha's Vineyard with a small Boston band and a special-delivery letter arrived from the bandleader Luis Russell, whom he had never met, offering him the drum chair. He answered by telegram that he could not start until after Labor Day. His first New York job was a Savoy Ballroom engagement in September 1945, and he stayed with Russell until 1947.

He moved into the new music quickly. From 1947 to 1949 he was Lester Young's drummer, and from 1949 to 1952 he held the drum chair in Charlie Parker's quintet alongside Red Rodney, Al Haig and Tommy Potter. On August 9, 1949 he played the Blue Note session that produced "Bouncing with Bud," "Wail" and "Dance of the Infidels" with Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, Sonny Rollins and Potter, still one of the defining bebop dates. Three months later, on November 11, he was on the Wardell Gray quartet session that produced "Twisted." He also worked and recorded through these years with Stan Getz, Kai Winding, Miles Davis and Milt Jackson. He described the transition without any mystique: he was a swing drummer playing what people were calling bebop, and audiences were still dancing to it.

From 1953 to 1958 he toured and recorded as Sarah Vaughan's drummer, in a trio with pianist Jimmy Jones and bassist Joe Benjamin. The December 1954 EmArcy session that paired Vaughan with Clifford Brown, Herbie Mann and Paul Quinichette is the best known of that run, and the 1954 single "Shulie a Bop," in which Vaughan introduces the trio in the vocal and Haynes answers with drum figures, became the track he was asked about most for the rest of his life. A trip to Europe in the fall of 1954 produced his own first records: a sextet date in Stockholm on October 3, 1954 that yielded the EmArcy ten-inch Busman's Holiday, and a session in Paris on October 26 with the teenage tenor player Barney Wilen and pianist Henri Renaud. It was in the 1950s that bassist Al McKibbon gave him the nickname "Snap Crackle," for the dry, high crack of his snare drum. In 1960 Esquire named him one of the best-dressed men in America, alongside Fred Astaire, Miles Davis, Clark Gable and Cary Grant.

Haynes worked in Thelonious Monk's quartet in 1958 and 1959 with Johnny Griffin and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the group documented on the Riverside albums Thelonious in Action and Misterioso, both taped at the Five Spot Café. What followed was the busiest freelance stretch of his career. He drummed all three of Eric Dolphy's Prestige and New Jazz leader albums, Outward Bound (April 1, 1960), Out There (August 15, 1960) and Far Cry (December 21, 1960); he played most of Oliver Nelson's records of the period, including The Blues and the Abstract Truth on February 23, 1961, the album that carries "Stolen Moments"; and he was the drummer on Stan Getz's Focus, cut with Eddie Sauter's string writing in the summer and fall of 1961. He led his own Impulse! date, Out of the Afternoon, on May 16 and 23, 1962, with Roland Kirk, Tommy Flanagan and Henry Grimes; the band had come together jamming at the Five Spot and Haynes took the idea to producer Bob Thiele himself. He followed it with two New Jazz quartet albums in 1963, Cracklin' with Booker Ervin and Cymbalism with Frank Strozier. By 1963 he was also filling in for Elvin Jones in John Coltrane's quartet, and the group's Newport Jazz Festival set of July 7, 1963, with its eighteen-minute "My Favorite Things," was recorded without his knowing it. In the same two years he made Andrew Hill's Black Fire and Smoke Stack and Jackie McLean's Destination... Out! and It's Time! for Blue Note.

He did not sit out the electric era. He drummed Gary Burton's Duster in April 1967, one of the founding records of jazz-rock, and in March 1968 he made Now He Sings, Now He Sobs with Chick Corea and Miroslav Vitouš, a trio record whose rhythmic language a generation of players took apart bar by bar. In 1970 he formed his own working band, the Hip Ensemble, a modernist group with rotating personnel that at various points held Hannibal Marvin Peterson, George Adams, Carl Schroeder and Stanley Cowell; it made Hip Ensemble (1971) and Senyah (1972) for Mainstream, and toured for most of the decade. Japanese labels recorded him as a leader in the middle 1970s, and Orrin Keepnews's Galaxy label gave him two albums, Thank You Thank You (1977) and Vistalite (1979), the second named for the see-through Ludwig kit he was playing.

In November 1981 he joined Corea and Vitouš for the ECM double album Trio Music, and the trio worked on and off through the decade, winning a Grammy nomination for its 1984 live sequel. He won his first Grammy in 1989 for McCoy Tyner's Blues for Coltrane and a second in 2000 for Like Minds, the Burton, Corea, Pat Metheny and Dave Holland record. Metheny had already put him at the center of Question and Answer, cut in a single day at the Power Station on December 21, 1989. From 1992 Haynes recorded steadily as a leader for the French label Dreyfus, seven studio and live albums plus a career box set over nineteen years, and in December 2002 he taped Fountain of Youth live at Birdland with a quartet of players in their twenties: Marcus Strickland, Martin Bejerano and John Sullivan. He kept the band and the name for the rest of the decade. The honors accumulated: the Danish Jazzpar Prize in 1994, an NEA Jazz Master fellowship in 1995, a French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996, induction into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1999 and the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 2004, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award presented in February 2012. His last album, Roy-Alty, was recorded in January 2011; the Jazz Foundation of America gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2019, and his planned 95th-birthday celebration in March 2020 was called off because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He passed away on November 12, 2024 in Nassau County, New York, after a short illness, at ninety-nine.

Haynes came up as a swing drummer and never fully gave up the dance-floor pulse underneath the bebop vocabulary, which is why his time feels loose and grounded at once. The signature was a snare drum tuned high, tight and dry, played in short cracking accents that interrupt the line rather than decorate it, and a ride cymbal beat that stays relaxed while swinging hard. Charles Mingus praised him for suggesting a beat rather than stating it. Drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts described the effect as feeling free and grooving at the same time, "like he has an internal clave," and Coltrane singled out the way Haynes stretched the rhythm during his stints in the quartet. He was also unusually melodic for a trap drummer, closer in phrasing to a timbales player than to his bebop contemporaries, which is part of why bandleaders as far apart as Lester Young, Monk, Coltrane, Corea and Metheny could all use him without adjustment. The younger drummers who hired him tell their own story: Jack DeJohnette put him on his 1968 leader debut, and Chick Corea, Gary Burton and Pat Metheny all kept coming back to him across three decades. The line also runs through his own family: his son Graham Haynes plays cornet, his son Craig Holiday Haynes plays drums, and his grandson Marcus Gilmore is a leading drummer of the generation after.