William Thomas Berry was born on July 31, 1958, in Duluth, Minnesota, the fifth child of Don and Anna Berry. At the age of three years, Berry moved with his family to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, where they would remain for the next seven years. In 1968, they were on the move again, this time to Sandusky, Ohio.

In 1972, the Berry family made their final move, to Macon, Georgia, just in time for Bill to start high school at Mount de Sales Academy. It was there that he met bass guitarist Mike Mills, and they played together in several different bands, including Shadowfax. Their first attempt at a career in music was short-lived. He and Mills decided to make money by getting day jobs. They rented an apartment on Arlington Place in Macon and Bill landed a job at the Paragon booking agency next door.

Berry and Mills moved to Athens, Georgia, in 1978, where they met Michael Stipe and Peter Buck. Prior to dropping out, Berry studied pre-law at the University of Georgia.

R.E.M. was formed in 1980. In addition to his duties as a drummer, Berry contributed occasional guitar, bass, mandolin, vocals, keyboards and piano on studio tracks. In concert, he sometimes performed on bass, and supplied regular backing vocals. Berry also made notable songwriting contributions, particularly for “Everybody Hurts” and “Man on the Moon”, both from Automatic for the People. Other Berry songs included “Perfect Circle”, “Driver 8”, “Cant Get There from Here” and “I Took Your Name”. The song “Leave” was also written by Berry for R.E.M.’s album New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996), which was his last album with the band.

During 1984, Berry also was drummer for the impromptu Hindu Love Gods, which featured his R.E.M. bandmates Peter Buck, Mike Mills, rocker Warren Zevon, and Bryan Cook.

In 1986, Berry married his then-girlfriend Mari. When crack began to infiltrate Athens in the early 1990s, the couple moved to nearby Farmington. “In 1988, I decided that I would broaden my portfolio, which was pretty slim back then. It’s not like I was rolling in dough,” he explained in 2019. “I wanted to buy land and found this spot. It’s sixty acres, and it’s far enough outside of town that it was cheap. It was, like, $2000/acre back in ’88. Land’s more like $10-$12,000 now. It was strictly an investment; I was going to sell it later.” His farm, which includes sheep, is at the north end of his property. A caretaker works on the farm; Berry does not anymore. He has a garden, but his caretaker also looks after that. “I get the rewards of it, but he does all the work.”

On March 1, 1995, at the Patinoire Auditorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, Berry collapsed on stage during an R.E.M. show from a ruptured brain aneurysm. He recovered and rejoined the band, but left in October 1997, saying that he no longer had the drive or enjoyment level to be in the band, and that he wanted to not travel. He later explained on VH-1’s Behind The Music:

His musical activities after leaving R.E.M. have been sporadic, but did include recording for the Tourette Syndrome Charity Album Welcome Companions in 2000. On May 11, 2018, he performed at the Winterville Auditorium in Winterville, Georgia, as part of a quintet named Mayor Ferrelle and the Councilmen, formed by the band’s vocalist and lead guitarist, city mayor Dodd Ferrelle. The other three members were John Kean, David Barbe and Adam Poulin.

In 2003, Berry and his girlfriend Cybele Lange had a son, Owen.

Asked where he goes on vacations, in an interview at his home in 2019, Berry stated: “I would never go on vacation. Vacation for me is right here. I spent enough time in airports and in vans and on buses. I kind of like sitting still for a while. Still haven’t grown tired of that.” He ventures in to Athens to “see shows I want; I don’t just go out and hang out at bars.” He added: “I get into shows about 1.6 times a month: maybe not twice a month, but more than once.”

Berry appeared in the 2020 Song Exploder documentary about the band’s song “Losing My Religion”, even playing part of his drum line from the song. In the same documentary, Peter Buck says, “There’s no drummer like Bill Berry on Earth. None. I have a lot of drummer friends, and they all ask me the same thing: ‘What’s his secret?’ And I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. My theory is that he uses the space between the high hat and the snare drum in a kind of disco-y way, without being too disco.”