John Preble was born in 1948 in New Orleans Louisiana to Warren G. Preble, a mathematician from Kansas and Marie Louise Soperri from Basel Switzerland. He grew up in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, a working class suburb of New Orleans. His mother encouraged him to pursue his interest in art and he had informal electric organ lessons for about a year as a teenager when the family purchased an electric chord organ. He developed an interest in film-making during high school when independent film during the independent filmmaking craze in the mid 1960s. He was inspired to write music by listening to the Beatles. His achievement on the organ was nothing special and only occasionally played with other musicians, however he continued to write songs.

He attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now known as the University of Louisiana in Lafayette where he planned to study architecture. His mischievous behavior resulted in him being dismissed from the university his first year. He returned the following year and completed a semester; however he was not allowed to return the following semester because of his low grades from the previous semester. After sitting out a semester he took a job with a motion picture studio in Dallas. He was there less than a year and returned to Lafayette to complete his Fine Arts degree program. Upon returning to Lafayette, he met Margareta Lahme, a divorced German who had 2 young sons and was thirteen years his senior. They shared a house that was a popular meeting place for artists and it was there where he met Ann O’Brien, who would become his wife years later. He was a popular student with his professors and very outspoken. His interest in music continued and his friends were mostly musicians and artists. During this period he had befriended Ed Pramuk, an art professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge; Pramuk encouraged him to transfer to the Baton Rouge school where after attending two semesters he graduated.

In the early seventies, Preble, Lahme, O’Brien, and John Hodge, an artist friend of the couple, moved to Abita Springs, Louisiana, with the idea of being able to live close to each other for artistic inspiration. While renovating the house Lahme had purchased, Preble learned the skills of electrical wiring, plumbing, and basic carpentry. These skills would later allow him to purchase and renovate his own “fixer upper” houses. Preble and Lahme separated a few years after moving to Abita Springs, and he purchased his first house across the street from Lahme’s home. Preble started Abita Springs Pottery that lasted only a couple of years; he stopped making pottery when he accepted a position on the faculty at Loyola University in New Orleans. Preble was relieved of his position because his aesthetic beliefs were not shared by his fellow professors – it was a mutual parting.