Jake Westbrook is BACK?!

AMERICA IS HEALING

But Graham, who is Jake Westbrook?

You are right not to know, you are wrong not to care.

For real though, this is exciting, and I’m kicking myself for not knowing sooner. I subbed to Jake’s channel years ago, then he got nuked by copyright stuff, then I unsubbed after a while, and…well, here’s the story.

Jake and his brother McClain (sp?) are purveyors of 1930s and 1940s music and radio shows. They grew up on old cassettes of the stuff and have dedicated their Internet work to keeping that era of production alive. Jake especially gained popularity with his curated playlists of music for different seasons, holidays and life events. I’m pretty sure I found his Thanksgiving music in 2019 or so, and they took me down a rabbit hole.

As you can guess, some of that music was still under copyright by giants like Sony, and Jake’s channel eventually got whacked and he had to shut down, so I just found playlists elsewhere. It wasn’t the same though. He really had an ear for that stuff and he assembled them the way a label would put together an album. There’s an art to it and he knew what he was doing.

With his brother he ran a channel called Yesterday Today, which focused more on the radio show side of the equation. It never had the popularity of Jake’s music playlists (you kind of have to wade through some bad shows). Yesterday Today also had custom bumper sketches that the Westbrook brothers recorded themselves, and they were charming in their own way, but also a little cringey at times. Still, they took their craft seriously.

Last September, Yesterday stopped uploading new episodes. They only got a few hundred listens per episode and I assumed they were running out of content after so many years. They didn’t have any contact info so I couldn’t email them and ask. Figured it was just one of those things that disappeared.

Then recently the Yesterday channel played a clip from a podcast where the brothers were guests. Turns out Jake has been uploading on his own channel again, doing music playlists like the old times. Must have gotten the copyright stuff resolved, and I’m thrilled. McClain, meanwhile, has gone into sports broadcasting on TV. They’ve only got so much bandwidth, understandably, so you put your energies where you can do the most of what you want.

I love it. I love when people gain momentum and build on it. Jake also wrote a novel that I reviewed a few years ago, I should re-read that and do a video on it. The dude just loves beautiful things from a bygone era and y’all know how much I like liking stuff.

Check out his novel A CASE IN OAK HAVEN and watch for my review coming this week on the channel.