John Lewis Bartee was born in Woodland, Georgia on November 15, 1912, eldest son of James Maxey Bartee & Nell Vashti Mathews. After studying music in Chicago and New York he became an arranger and composer for some of the biggest names in the music business includig Artie Shaw, Cab Calloway, Machito, Lucky Millinder, Mario Bauza, and others. He, along with Bauza, was instrumental in the development of the Cuban bop or 'Cu-Bop' sound coming out of 1940s New York City. Said Mario Bauza, "Our idea was to bring Latin music up to the standard of American orchestras. So I brought a couple of guys that arranged for Calloway and Chick Webb to write for me. I wanted them to give me the sound, to orchestrate it. Calloway arranger John Bartee."

He wrote the arrangement of No Noise recorded by Machito in 1948 and featuring Charlie Parker. In the following year Bartee would write an arrangement for the Charlie Parker with Strings studio session. Sadly his arrangement of Love Walked In was never recorded nor performed by Parker.

Bartee's fabulous arrangement of Mucho de Nada (1949) "laid down a carpet of cross rhythms and off-beats for Artie's clarinet to dance on, while the other reeds sighed like sugarcane in the wind." Also, his arrangement of Orinoco, another Latin number was full of subtle colors and dynamics. "Orinoco was almost a perfect piece of music," Shaw said.

In the early 1960s Bartee played saxophone with Raymond Scott, and was featured on the Bell Telephone Hour TV show Designs in Music (1961).

Bartee died on December 17, 2001 and was buried in Gallup, New Mexico.