Gordon Ross Thompson

Gordon Thompson is Professor Emeritus at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York where he chaired the Department of Music and directed the Asian Studies and London programs. In London, he led seminars on the relationship between British culture in the sixties and its popular music. His classes at Skidmore College on sixties British pop, the Beatles, India, and music in mass media challenged conventional assumptions about music curricula. He also produced and played in an annual celebration of the music of the Beatles. Beatlemore Skidmania became one of the College’s most popular traditions.

Thompson graduated with a B.Mus from the University of Windsor where he was also a student of Nazir Jairazbhoy in Indian music theory and a M.Mus at the University of Illinois under the renowned ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl with a thesis about the history of the song "Georgia on My Mind." Rejoining Jairazbhoy at UCLA, his PhD dissertation considered how the cultural values of Gujarati-speaking western India are reflected in its musics.

His first book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop considers the infrastructure behind the rise of this music. His two-volume second book, Sixties British Pop, Outside In places these artists and their recordings in the cultural contexts of the era.

Interviews with him have been broadcast on National Public Radio, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Australian Broadcasting Corporation.