Political humor of the 1950's - you don't really hear much about it these days. The forum for political humor has changed a lot over the decades. But in 1959 Political humor and social satire, like most social movements of the day, were considered outside the mainstream and relegated to the domain of nightclubs, college campuses and the occasional appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

But that's not to say the message was buried, and comedians like Mort Sahl rose to prominence during a time when questioning where our society was heading was just getting started. It was also a time when FM was slowly coming into its own and that proved to be a great launching pad for a lot of consciousness raising, politically as well as culturally.

I ran across this broadcast, originally aired over a local Los Angeles FM station (KRHM which became known as KMET and later The Wave) who happened to have a recording of a Mort Sahl appearance at L.A. State College in September of 1959. As far as I know, it's never been available commercially and it's classic Mort Sahl.

You may need to Google many of the names he mentions, like Claire Booth Luce, but you'll get a taste of what the political climate was like from a non-mainstream perspective. And that could be instructive or ironic, since a lot of the issues Sahl talks about are issues we're still dealing with some 50+ years later.

And further evidence some things just don't change, and may never change.

Here is a performance by Mort Sahl, as recorded at L.A. State College and broadcast by Les Claypool over KRHM-FM in Los Angeles on September 30, 1959.

This might be a stretch, but I had to include it in our look at On-Air live Music tracks pre-1950. Tonight it's a two-song excerpt from The Phoenix Hosiery Company Program Featuring Ben Bernie and His Orchestra, recorded in April 1931 and broadcast over the NBC Blue Network.

Big Bands (Sweet and/or Syncopated) were a staple in the diet of early radio since the concept of a "disc jockey" hadn't been arrived at yet, and because playing commercial records on the air wasn't allowed by the FCC, most radio stations had a band of one sort or another on staff, just in case there needed to be some dance music.

So this two-song excerpt was typical of what was played on Radio in the 1920's and 1930's. Ben Bernie was considered a huge star in his day and his program was one of the most popular in the early 1930's.

The two songs featured are Wabash Moon and Have You Forgotten? (with a pretty dreary vocal "refrain", as was the case with a lot of big band tracks at the time).

In any event, it's history, it's a period of time some 81 years ago, the music's been largely forgotten (at least the pop material) and you may be hearing this for the first time. It may sound totally foreign, painfully weird and embarrassingly quaint - but that's what people were listening to in 1931.

And they went nuts over it.

I've been doing a lot of Roundtable's lately devoted to radio sessions by bands from the 1960's-2000's, but haven't really investigated any of that treasure trove of radio sessions done in the 1930's and 1940's, when just about every major network radio program had at least one or two guest appearances by major recording artists singing either their latest hits or songs they never recorded commercially.

A lot have been reissued in various formats over the years featuring a vast galaxy of Pop and Jazz artists of the day. I'm not sure if this one has been reissued. If not, that's a shame, but not anymore since you get to hear it here.

Connee Boswell (or Connie Boswell depending on which period you're talking about) was part of the legendary sister singing team, The Boswell Sisters, who were very popular from the 1920's until their breakup in 1936. Connee went on to pursue a solo career and became one of the most influential Jazz singers of her day. Her style of singing was cited as a major influence on, among others, a young Ella Fitzgerald.

Tonight's track, Boogie Woogie Piggie is from 1942 and was from The Old Gold Cigarette Program, airing in 1942. There's no mention of the band backing her, but it might be Ray Noble's Orchestra (just a hunch). It falls in that gray area between Novelty, Scat and Jazz, but done in true Connee Boswell fashion, it's original.

Get ready for more of these "one-off" examples this week. There's quite a pile of them.

Okay, this is a real stretch tonight. As long as we've been on the subject of Pop Music and Mainstream Pop artists, I thought I would go all the way back to the 1920's and give an example of what Pop Music was all about 90 years ago.

Paul Whiteman, who was alternately referred to as either "Pops" or "The King Of Jazz" was quite possibly the first million selling artist in the history of recording. His first huge hit was a song called "Whispering" which, according to whoever was keeping sales and popularity records at the time, was in the Number One position for 11 weeks and dropped to number 2 for another 20.

As much as the title "King Of Jazz" has been disputed over the years, one thing was certain - he was the world's first Pop Star, raking in an estimated $1million a year in sales and appearances (in 1920's money) and was a widely influential figure in music. In 1924 he was the one who introduced audiences to Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue for the first time. He was largely responsible for the early career of Bing Crosby as a member of Whiteman's singing group The Rhythm Boys. He was one of the first bandleaders to cross the color line by working with arrangers such as Fletcher Henderson and recording with such artists as Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday (one session for Capitol in the 1940's).

When the genre of Roaring 20's Jazz morphed into Swing in the 1930's, Whiteman's popularity began to wane, but by that time he had already established a place in musical history. He went largely into retirement in the late 1930's and briefly emerged in the 1940's.

But in the 1920's, Whiteman was riding the crest of a huge wave of popularity and he recorded a vast amount of records for RCA Victor including tonight's entry - a 1922 recording of Bygones which sounds remarkably like a follow-up to his 1920 hit Whispering.

Yes, the mainstream Pop Music machine was already getting started and it's first honest-to-god Popstar was born.

If the record sounds strange, this was state-of-the-art in 1922. The new-and-improved method of recording didn't get underway until late 1925. But remember, we're talking 90 years ago.

It had to start somewhere.