Woodrow Charles Herman was born on May 16, 1913, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Otto and Myrtle Herrmann; his mother had been born in Poland, and he later changed the spelling of the family name. His father loved show business, and Herman worked as a child singer and tap dancer in vaudeville before he took up the clarinet and the saxophone by the age of twelve. As a young professional he played in the bands of Tom Gerun, Harry Sosnick and Gus Arnheim, and in 1934 he joined the orchestra of the songwriter and bandleader Isham Jones, with whom he recorded often. He had met the aspiring actress Charlotte Neste in 1931, and the two married on September 27, 1936.

When Jones tired of the demands of leading a band, Herman took over what was left of the orchestra. Its first Decca session, on November 6, 1936, produced "Wintertime Dreams," and the group was soon billed as the Band That Plays the Blues. Herman's ballad vocals made up much of the early catalog, but it was the instrumentals that sold: "Woodchopper's Ball," recorded in 1939 and written by Herman with Joe Bishop, became the biggest hit of his career after Decca kept re-releasing it for several years. In January 1942 his vocal on "Blues in the Night" went to number one on Billboard's chart, and a small-group offshoot billed as Woody Herman's Woodchoppers backed Bing Crosby on "The Whistler's Mother-in-Law" (1941) and "Deep in the Heart of Texas" (1942). The band was already turning toward Duke Ellington's sound, with Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster sitting in on some 1943 recordings, and Herman had commissioned Dizzy Gillespie arrangements, including "Down Under," recorded on July 24, 1942, before hiring Ralph Burns as a staff arranger.

By the end of 1944 the band was largely new, and Herman called it the First Herd. After it signed with Columbia in February 1945 (its first side, "Laura," earned a gold record), the personnel included the trumpeters Pete Candoli and Sonny Berman, the trombonist Bill Harris, the tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips, the guitarist Billy Bauer, the pianist Ralph Burns, the bassist Chubby Jackson and the drummer Dave Tough. On February 26, 1945, it recorded "Caldonia" in an arrangement by Neal Hefti and Burns; the soaring eight-bar trumpet passage near the end, often credited to Gillespie, was written by Hefti. "Apple Honey," "Northwest Passage" and "Bijou" were other staples. Igor Stravinsky wrote the Ebony Concerto for the band on a commission from Herman, finishing it on December 1, 1945; the band first played it, with Herman on the solo clarinet part, at Carnegie Hall on March 25, 1946, with Walter Hendl conducting, and Herman and Stravinsky recorded it in Hollywood on August 19, 1946. The band won the Metronome poll's band division in 1946, and then Herman broke it up in December of that year, at the height of its success, to spend more time with his family.

In 1947 he formed the Second Herd, also called the Four Brothers Band after the Jimmy Giuffre piece recorded for Columbia on December 27, 1947, which features the saxophone section of Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff, Herbie Steward and Stan Getz, soloing in that order. "Early Autumn," which grew out of the fourth part of Burns's Summer Sequence and was recorded for Capitol on December 30, 1948, carried an eight-bar Getz solo that made his name. Al Cohn took over from Steward about a year later, and the band also included Gene Ammons, Lou Levy, Oscar Pettiford, Terry Gibbs and Shelly Manne before money problems ended it in 1949. Herman and his band appeared in the film New Orleans (1947) with Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. He then led the Third Herd from 1950 to 1956, a more danceable group that toured Europe in the 1950s and for a time recorded for his own Mars label, with sidemen who included Bill Perkins, Carl Fontana, Nat Pierce and Richie Kamuca.

After some short-lived small groups, including a sextet with Nat Adderley and Charlie Byrd, a new Herd was a hit at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival, and through the 1960s he fronted bands with the trumpeter Bill Chase, the trombonist Phil Wilson, the tenor saxophonist Sal Nistico and the drummer Jake Hanna. From 1968, on the album Light My Fire, the library leaned toward rock and pop arrangements written by his young players. In the early 1970s he toured frequently, took on more jazz education work and younger sidemen, and earned the nickname Road Father, with his bands known as the Young Thundering Herds; he was one of the featured halftime performers at Super Bowl VII in January 1973. The albums Giant Steps (1973) and Thundering Herd (1974) both won Grammy Awards, and the bands of those years brought in Alan Broadbent, Andy LaVerne, Joe Beck and Frank Tiberi, among others. The band played without its leader on Frank Sinatra's The Main Event at Madison Square Garden in October 1974, and on November 20, 1976, a reconstituted Herman band played Carnegie Hall to mark his fortieth anniversary as a bandleader. He recorded for Concord from about 1980, including the Rosemary Clooney album My Buddy (1983).

In his last years he kept working largely to pay back taxes that a 1960s business manager had failed to remit, celebrating his fiftieth anniversary as a bandleader in 1986 and handing most of the leadership to the reed-section leader Frank Tiberi as his health declined. Herman passed away on October 29, 1987, at the age of 74, and was honored that year with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A Catholic funeral was held on November 2 at St. Victor's in West Hollywood, and he is interred in the columbarium at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The University of Houston established the Woody Herman Music Archives in 1974, and Berklee College of Music gave him an honorary doctorate in 1977. Tiberi continued to lead a Woody Herman Orchestra after his death.

AllMusic's Scott Yanow describes Herman as a fine swing clarinetist, an alto saxophonist influenced by Johnny Hodges, a solid soprano saxophonist and a spirited blues singer, and puts his greatest significance in his role as the leader of a long line of big bands; a 1985 New York Times review of his band remarked on the dry humor with which he shouted the blues. He kept his repertoire modern more consistently than most bandleaders of the swing era, hiring young players and using their arrangements. The First Herd was strongly influenced by Duke Ellington and the Count Basie Orchestra and combined bop themes with swing rhythm parts, the Second Herd's saxophone section took its light, nearly vibrato-free sound from the style of Lester Young, and the bands of the late 1960s and 1970s added rock-influenced material and instruments rarely heard in jazz, such as bassoon, oboe and French horn. Yanow notes that Herman played "Four Brothers" and "Early Autumn" nightly for nearly forty years even though he preferred to create new music. His bands won the DownBeat poll in 1945 and the Metronome poll in 1946 and 1953, and they collected three competitive Grammy Awards in addition to his Lifetime Achievement Award. In the 1970s his work in jazz education and his young sidemen earned him the nickname Road Father.