Most of his income came from coaching young singers including Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, along with many others, and his secondary income came from booking musical engagements.
He was a very fine keyboard player and accordionist and (though no one today knows what this was) he made it to the Ted Mack Amateur Hour television program (which was a talent contest on national television - really, the only one) back in the fifties and first part of the 60s.
Bob fought cancer for quite a few years and finally succumbed. Since then, the really talented horn man (who was one of the others of us in this small Bob-created lead-sheet-based German band), Jim Mahannah - who plays all woodwinds and brass as well as keyboard - has been fronting all the jobs we've been doing while trying to manage without an accordion (as the secondary and tertiary level accordionists in Memphis have also either moved away or passed away). Jim plays saxophone and trumpet with his left hand and catches what he can on the keyboard with his right hand while he's playing. (Several choruses, obviously he just plays the keyboard.) Of course he has to move his hand back and forth from his saxophone to the keyboard (which is set on an accordion type sound). When he plays the clarinet or the flute, he really can't do those (instantaneously back and forth) with the keyboard at the same time, which is why he brings his regular guitar player along to help cover everything.
In his regular (not German) band, Jim's wife (a pianist and organist) has learned how to play the bass over the years, and she plays one of those small "ukulele basses". Jim's younger brother used to be his bass player, but - because of the wife situation - Jim's brother, Joe, has moved over to playing drums.
Last night, we covered an Oktoberfest with the guitarist, the two Mahannah brothers, me on tuba, and I was playing some harmonies and melodies on trombone, as well as playing some Melody course choruses up in the top of the tuba range (no... nothing higher than D or E flat above the bass clef. The idea wasn't to play high for the sake of doing so, but just cover some choruses or verses with a different "voice".)
When Bob Westbrook fronted the band, he had (I don't know if he ever actually went to Europe and his lifetime) studied a lot of live records of Oktoberfests, as well as studio recorded German bands, and he had written down lead sheets for a whole bunch of really popular polkas and waltzes in Germany - all in their original keys - and all with all the correct passing chords. (He also picked up most of the Oktoberfest traditions from the live recordings and Incorporated those into our jobs. With Bob at the helm - back then, we put on a darn good show.) Bob also obviously had a whole lot of fun doing this, because his regular Bob Westbrook Entertainment business, I believe, put him under a lot of pressure, and this was just pure fun. In the past, that's what we did. This was also before Jim had a cancerous tumor removed from his throat and (previously) had a pretty good singing voice, so when I would play the bass guitar on some songs, I could also sing harmony and we had a three-part harmony thing going on quite a few things.
After Bob passed away, Jim didn't have any of Bob's old wrinkled lead sheets that Bob would always bring. (I never had any music to look at, because there was just one copy of everything, and the same was true for Jim, though Jim could sort of peek over Bob's shoulder if he really needed to).
After Bob became frail from cancer and eventually passed away, Jim started reconstructing (not all, but many of the) things that we used to play from memory and created new lead sheets for himself to play either wind instruments or simultaneously wind and piano, as I described above).
Back when Bob fronted the band with the accordion, I played all that stuff on F tuba and just learned all of it from playing it - no reading (this was when we played six nights a week back in 1979 and 1980) and I learned all of the polkas and waltzes in their original keys and with all the enhancing and correct passing chords. (ex: When we played Oscar and Hammerstein's "Edelweiss", Bob would use some very nice substitute chords which were even a little bit more sophisticated than those in the movie, etc., etc ) Jim and I could even play along with Bob on several Strauss waltzes - including all the verses, and without glancing over at Bob's lead sheets.
That six night a week job well over 40 years ago was pretty interesting. We had a very statuesque youthful middle-aged German lady who sang with us and wore very fancy costume (she had been a regular on a pop music show in the '60s called "Shindig". We had to play a lot of pop, oldies, and standards mixed in with the German stuff. She could cover all that and (astonishingly and actually somewhat bizarre) she was actually a specialist at singing Janis Joplin. (Imagine that in a German costume, and sung by a very beautiful woman... Unexpected to say the least.) At that original gig, we also had a dedicated trumpet player, so there were six of us on stage... all wearing lederhosen (and her, with her expensive costume).
Since Jim has reconstructed a lot of that music simply from memory (actually, he did this quite a few years ago), he's put things in keys like C, F, B-flat, E-flat, G (the only key that features a sharp), maybe one or two in A-flat, if those were really rock solid original keys for those particular songs...
...so no more Schützenliesl polka in E-major (now - not even F, but) - I think that particular one he actually put in C.
So I guess you can imagine that we have to sort of hustle these days to pull off these jobs.
Jim has all of his paper copies of what he has reconstructed, and he has scanned them and his guitar player sitting over there has all of them in his tablet. I'm sitting in the back with nothing but my tuba (no paper).
I formerly (this was throughout the years - when Bob was still alive, and still fronting the band) played everything that we played on either bass guitar or F tuba, and now I'm bringing an E-flat compensating tuba (when playing E-flat tuba, I really don't even know what "notes" I'm playing. That's nearly exclusively a play by ear instrument for me.) and a trombone (since one of the horns that Jim no longer brings along is his bass trumpet). The one thing I canNOT allow myself too do while we're playing these tunes is to THINK (as all the keys are different, the length of the tuba is different, and even the tuba's fingering system is different). Simply, I must just PLAY, and play "in the moment" of each of these German songs that we used to play so long ago and have played between 0 ti 3 or 4 times in all the late-Septembers and Octobers since then. We're I to begin to "think"about anything, I would likely mess up. I simply must JUST PLAY.
(Yeah, we had a gig last night and another one Saturday.
This year, I'll play - only - four Oktoberfest jobs... more than most years in the last couple of decades - and consider that this is Memphis, and not Minnesota, or Wisconsin, or south Texas, or one of those types of areas. Back in the '80s, we actually played a full weekend at two different really upscale Ozark resort/retirement communities for a few years, but that didn't last very long. I don't know if it's like this in the parts of the country where this is really a big thing and a strong tradition, but - around here - the jazz musicians seem to be the ones who play the Oktoberfest jobs... We tend to treat the polkas and waltzes in the same manner that a pickup jazz band would treat those types of songs: We play through the song, someone takes a chorus - though we play German-sounding figures in our improvised solos (rather than Jazz sounding ones), someone might come in with another instrument and play the actual melody and another chorus - or verse, or whatever - again, and - if people are still dancing - we stretch it out, and then we'll figure out a way to tag. We don't have any of those little books or arrangements or anything that the formal bands in those regional areas mentioned above have... We just have our lead sheets.)
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FOOTNOTE:
The early 1960s television show "Shindig!" was an emergency replacement for the youth-watched show "Hootenanny", as the Beatles' and the Stones' "British invasion" had caused folk music (very popular with teenagers in college students, up until then) popularity to drop like a rock, so Shindig! was an emergency reformat to include rock-and-roll and other types of music youth-targeted music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shindig!