Free and steady state forced transverse vibrations of non-uniform beams are investigated with a proposed method, leading to a series solution. The obtained series is verified to be convergent and linearly independent in a convergence test and by the non-zero value of the corresponding Wronski determinant, respectively. The obtained solution is rigorous, which can be reduced to a classical solution for uniform beams. The proposed method can deal with arbitrary non-uniform Euler-Bernoulli beams in principle, but the methods in terms of special functions or elementary functions can only work in some special cases.