Coleman Randolph Hawkins was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 21, 1904. Musically precocious from an early age, he played both piano and cello in childhood. Feeling that he would receive a better quality education, his mother arranged for him to attend school in Topeka, Kansas, and live with her sisters at 603 W. 8th Street.

Hawkins attended the old Topeka High School and apparently received extensive private musical tutoring through Washburn University while attending THS. In Topeka at some point early in time, Coleman also began playing the saxophone, which quickly became his instrument of choice. By the age of 14, Hawk was playing professionally around eastern Kansas, Kansas City, and St. Joseph, which probably accounts for his academic ambivalence at THS in everything but music.

Sometime between the ages of 17 and 18, Hawk left Kansas when he hooked up with Mamie Smith’s touring jazz group. This led him to New York, which would remain home base for most of the remainder of his life. Soon after his arrival in NY, he joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. It was with Henderson that Hawk's unique sound and advanced harmonic approach to improvisation began to flower and attract the attention of musicians, fans, and critics. Within a very short time his playing had elevated the tenor sax to an unprecedented level as an instrument to be reckoned with. In 1934 Hawk left the US to pursue a more profitable professional path playing jazz in Europe, where he achieved near superstar status. However the winds of war and the rise of Nazism made it imperative for him to return to America in the late 1930s.

Through the '40s, '50s and '60s, Hawkins worked and recorded prolifically. His 1939 recording of "Body and Soul" became a standard for jazz ballad improvisation, and remains one of the milestone records in the history of jazz to this day. The jazz luminaries with whom Hawk recorded during his career is a veritable "who’s who" of the first half century of recorded jazz. Although rooted in the swing tradition, Hawk remained very open-minded to new stylistic developments. He certainly was one of the most beloved figures of his time.

Coleman Hawkins died on May 19, 1969, at the age of 64 in New York City.