Both of her parents musicians, they played hymns and sang in the choir at the Baptist church where Madison Goodson was a Deacon.

[5] Though her parents disapproved of ragtime, blues, and jazz, only playing religious music, Billie and her sisters were drawn to it.

When Ms. Pierce was about ten years old, she and her sisters would go down to the Belmont Theatre to listen to Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith when they passed through Pensacola, Florida.

Some accounts claim she toured with Gertrude "Ma" Rainey;[6] however, during this time she was actually accompanying Ida Cox at the Belmont Theatre.

In 1929, she was working in a nine-piece band named the Nighthawks Orchestra in Birmingham, Alabama when she heard that her sister, Sadie, had fallen ill and needed a temporary replacement.

Sadie and her husband, Abbey "Chinee" Foster on drums, in Buddy Petit's band on the SS Madison in New Orleans.

[7] In 1932, she played piano with Alphonse Picou's five-piece (along with Johnny Dave, banjo; Ernest Milton, drums; Picou, clarinet; Lawrence Toca trumpet) at the Rialto Nightclub on Jefferson Davis Parkway for a couple of years.