Bass attended the University of Virginia for his undergraduate degree in psychology, which he received in 1951, and was a scholar at the US Army Medical Research Laboratory from 1953 to 1954, where he studied psychophysiology. He received his master’s from the University of Kentucky in 1956. He completed his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961. His research career began as an archaeologist, excavating Native American grave sites in the Midwestern United States during the 1950s. He mentions in Death’s Acre that this activity earned him the informal title “Indian grave-robber number one” from an Indian activist, though no clashes with Native Americans ever occurred. He worked briefly at the universities of Kansas and Nebraska during this time. He was hired by the University of Tennessee in 1971 to head their anthropology department, which was in the process of being split from the history department at the time. He started the university’s first anthropological research facility that same year, which was moved to its present location in the early 1980s. He established the university’s Forensic Anthropology Center in 1987.

Bass has been married three times. He married his first wife, Carol Ann Owens, whom he met while doing research for the Army, in 1953. Owens died of colon cancer in 1993. His second marriage, in 1994, was to Annette Blackbourne, who died in 1997 from lung cancer. Later that year he married Carol Lee Hicks, who had been a friend of his since childhood. Bass has three sons, Charlie, William Marvin IV, and Jim. Bass is an atheist.