American musicologist Lawrence Gushee was born on 25 February 1931 in Ridley Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and studied at Haverford College, Yale University, Dijon University and the Manhattan School of Music.
He specialised in medieval music and early jazz, producing his Yale doctoral dissertation on The Musica Disciplina of Aurelian of Réôme: a critical edition and commentary and writing Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band (Oxford University Press, 2005). He also played clarinet in the New Golden Rule Orchestra.
Lawrence Gushee died at a nursing home in Urbana, Illinois, on 6 January 2015, aged eighty-three,