The Abyssinian thrush is found in Eritrea and other parts of the Horn of Africa, as well as an area to the southeast extending from the African Great Lakes region to north eastern Zambia and Malawi.

[2] The Abyssinian thrush was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[3][4] Gmelin based his description on "Merle brun d'Abissinie" that had been described in 1775 by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his multi-volume work Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.

The species were split based on the results of a molecular phylogenetic study published in 2005 that compared mitochondrial DNA sequences.

[citation needed] This species is a typical member of the genus Turdus but its habits and biology have been little studied, as it was considered to be a subspecies of olive thrush.