DeDe Pierce was born Joseph De Lacroix Pierce in New Orleans in 1904 into a musical Creole family, learning trumpet from Professor Paul Chaligny and Kid Rena before turning professional in the mid-1920s with Arnold DePass's band. Billie Pierce was born Wilhelmina Goodson in Marianna, Florida in 1907, the youngest of a family of piano-playing sisters, and cut her teeth on the vaudeville circuit around Pensacola before settling in New Orleans in 1930, where she played piano behind blues singers including Bessie Smith.
The two married in 1935 and performed together for the rest of their lives, anchoring the house band at the New Orleans dance hall Luthjen's for more than two decades alongside players like Alphonse Picou and “Big Eye” Louis Nelson Delille. Serious setbacks struck in the 1950s — a stroke left Billie temporarily paralyzed, and glaucoma cost DeDe his eyesight and his day job as a bricklayer — but the couple kept working as a duo, and as traditional jazz found new audiences in the years around the opening of Preservation Hall, Billie and DeDe became two of its most beloved figures, recording for Riverside, Atlantic, and Preservation Hall's own label before their deaths within a year of each other in 1973 and 1974.
