Ray Whitaker belongs to an increasingly rare breed of radio personalities, the disc jockey who chooses every song he plays and shares on the air the reason why he picked each one.

Since 2008, he has hosted a weekly program on WMVY called Just Four Guys. His final episode aried on on Saturday, May 9.

“I’ll always have an affiliation with MVY,” Mr. Whitaker told the Gazette. “I love them. That’s where I met my wife [Laurel Redington].”

Just Four Guys began as an exploration of the Beatles’ legacy and developed over the years into a wide-ranging, sometimes provocative hour of music and thought.

“It started to morph away from a Beatles-centric program into a bit more commentary on the human condition,” said Mr. Whitaker, who fell in love with radio as a boy outside New York city in the early 1970s.

“The era of the album-oriented rock format essentially became part of my DNA,” he said. His older brother’s battered collection of 1960s rock LPs also helped form Mr. Whitaker’s tastes, though he couldn’t play the tracks with cigarette burns in the vinyl.

“He didn’t take care of his albums,” Mr. Whitaker said.

Hearing WNEW DJ Dennis Elsas interview John Lennon in 1974 was a pivotal moment, Mr. Whitaker recalled.

“It represented the pinnacle of someone’s radio career,” he said.

Later, Mr. Whitaker also took inspiration from non-musical radio broadcasters such as Howard Stern and Don Imus — not so much for their content, he told Just Four Guys listeners last week, but because he admired their tone.

“It was conversational, it called attention to the pretense in the world and it was not above being human,” he said. “I began to think maybe I could get into this business.”

The radio industry is a notoriously fickle work environment and Mr. Whitaker bounced in and out of a number of on-air jobs. With Just Four Guys, however, he found a niche, not only on WMVY but at the listener-sponsored internet broadcasters beatlesarama.com and planetpootwaddle.com, both of which ran the program for years.

“It started as a band appreciation, society type program, and from there I started to branch out, from just Beatles to bands they influenced. . . and before you knew it I started playing Ozzy [Osbourne],” he said. “I justified all of it, whether it made sense or not.”

WMVY general manager and program director PJ Finn allowed more than usual leeway for the show, Mr. Whitaker said.

“I give him a lot of credit,” he said. “I’m always voicing alternative points of view, and sometimes they’re pretty far out.”

Mr. Finn also forwards fan mail from listeners, Mr. Whitaker said.

“The best compliment I got recently, and I’m hesitant to say it because I don’t want to sound like [a jerk], a guy in New Jersey said ‘You’re my Timothy Leary.’”

While he’s leaving the WMVY airwaves, Mr. Whitaker will continue hosting his own show on the internet. Right now, his Soundcloud podcast is titled It’s a Whitaker Thing. That’s a placeholder, he said, until he comes up with something more descriptive.