It’s hard not to love those early movie musicals, from the very first years of talking pictures, with their chorus lines of a dozen or so zaftig teenage girls prancing about, only loosely in step with one another. This was a few years before the Rockettes and Busby Berkeley popularized the idea of chorus girls dancing in exact unison, injecting a more defined sense of artistic precision than could be found in anything previously seen in a musical show or on film.

The pop music and jazz of the 1920s and ’30s, which are sampled on a highly recommended series of compact discs under the imprimatur of the long-running “Big Broadcast” radio series — the third volume of which will be made available in May by Rivermont Records — affects me the same way. Before Benny Goodman raised the bar considerably in terms of inspiring big bands to play with airtight precision, the jazz and dance bands of the late ’20s and early ’30s featured that same kind of immediate, organic chutzpah. The difference between hearing the same arrangement played by Fletcher Henderson in the mid-1920s, and then by Goodman a generation later, is the distinction separating a band full of personalities getting its act together and an ensemble directed by a brilliant and highly competitive leader who drilled his band like an Olympic team.

For more than 35 years, this music, which is so overlooked in history that it doesn’t have a name (you could do worse than to call it “Little Rascals” music), has found its most enduring home on Sunday nights on WFUV’s “The Big Broadcast.” The DJ Rich Conaty has done more than any scholar or musician to wave the flag for this music. It’s the only place on the airwaves where you can learn the difference between Red Nichols, Red McKenzie, and Henry “Red” Allen.

Over the last three years, Mr. Conaty has assembled the three-volume “Big Broadcast” series, working with the independent Rivermont label of Lynchburg, Va. Each comprises a sample of different bands and singers of the era, which in itself is a good thing — fully representative of a period when almost no one listened to more than one record by the same artist in a row. The anthologies, naturally, whet your appetite for more: “Two-Faced Woman,” included on the forthcoming Volume 3, makes me regret that no one has done a comprehensive reissue of the marvelous Hal Kemp band, one of history’s most infamously underrated units. This was also an era when none but the most informed music fans bothered to distinguish between pop and jazz. With a few exceptions, it was all dance music; even 99% of vocal records were in foxtrot tempo.

One cliché regarding the ’20s is the preponderance of effeminate tenor vocalists. This was a time before Bing Crosby hipped the world to more masculine-sounding baritones. The singer-drummer Tom Stacks, charming as he is, is so emasculated on the 1931 “I Lost My Gal Again” that every time he turns around, his “gal” has left him to do a little business on the side. By contrast, many of the tracks from the early ’30s positively revel in low timbres that would have been nearly impossible to record before the advent of electrical microphones just a few years earlier. The bizarro basso known as “Singin’ Sam” proved that deeper voices could also sound surreal and strange. And it’s not just the vocals. “Buckin’ the Wind,” by the San Francisco bandleader Anson Weeks, features a bass clarinet solo that could have been played by Eric Dolphy’s uncle, while the band led by Ozzie Nelson (patriarch of the pop music clan) features a prominent baritone sax throughout.

If not quite as Swinging with a capitol “S,” like Count Basie, this snappy music has a relentless, enthralling drive to it. As the latest volume climbs to a conclusion, Mr. Conaty lays one toe-tapper after another on us, and they steadily build energy. Isham Jones’s “Pardon My Southern Accent,” Nelson’s “Mandy,” and a wildly over-the-top radio performance of “Sweet Georgia Brown” all crackle and pop along very nicely, thank you. George Scott Wood’s “Dames” and the Cleveland-based Barney Rapp’s “Bagpipe Stomp” illustrate that even Brits and Scots could get into the act.

Perhaps the most revelatory side on the latest volume of “The Big Broadcast” is “Was I?,” which was sung by one Peggy Hill with bandleader Sid Peltyn and amounts to the “Juno” of 1932. The song is more commonly referenced by its first and last lines — “Was I drunk, was he handsome, and did my ma give me hell!” — which is phrased more like an exclamation than a question. It isn’t so much that it’s about a 16-year-old girl who meets a “youth” (“a bit uncouth”) and decides impulsively to spend the night with him, but that she does it so recklessly and joyously.

This no conventional tale of fallen virtue, a sophisticated lady, or a two-faced woman led astray by a mustachioed cad in a top hat out of a D.W. Griffith flick; it is an empowered, sexually liberated female who knows exactly what she’s getting into. It’s every bit as “adult” as anything by any blues singer or even Edith Piaf, and considerably more so than anything heard in the pop music of the last 75 years. And yes, you can dance to it.

wfriedwald@nysun.com