Edmond Dédé was born free in New Orleans on 20 November 1827. His parents were free Creoles of color who had immigrated to New Orleans around 1809 from the French West Indies. His father became chef de musique of a local militia unit and was the boy's first professor. Dédé's first instrument, as befitted the son of a bandmaster, was the clarinet, but he soon developed into a violin prodigy. He studied violin with Constant in Oebergue, a local free black violinist and director of the local Philharmonic Society founded by free Creoles of color sometime in the late antebellum period, and with Italian-born Ludovico Gabici, director of the St Charles Theater orchestra and one of the earliest publishers of music in the city. He studied counterpoint and harmony' with Eugene Prevost, French-born winner of the 1831 Prix de Rome and conductor of the orchestras at the Theatre d'Orleans and the French Opera of New Orleans, and with New York-born free black musician Charles Richard Lambert, father of Sidney and Lucien Lambert, and a conductor of the Philharmonic Society, which was the first non-theatrical orchestra in the city and even included some white musicians among it's one hundred instrumentalists, an extremely large aggregation for the time.