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mono = monoaural = you can only listen to the music thru one speaker.
stereo = stereophonic = listening to music thru two speakers.
in the early days of audio recording and reproduction, it meant the music was recorded and and reproduced in one track recorders and/or players, which essentially meant cramming everything on just one mic and one speaker for playback.
thru the years, recorders started to add more tracks to the recorders (2-, 4-, 8-tracks until the 60's) to have a bigger spectrum and better chances of mixability. until the 60's, though, players could only reproduce on one track (meaning that if people recorded in 2 or 4 tracks, they had to bounce and mixdown those tracks into just one). in the 60's, stereophonic reproduction systems, along with the advent of headphones, came to revolutionize and provide better and truer reproduction capabilities, since using two speakers to play the music, they give a better representation of the sound to the human ears.
EDIT::as noted below, many older recordings where pressed as mono mixes (the only alternative back then). many of those recordings have been re-released on stereo-lps, cassettes, cds, etc. and the quickest and most inexpensive way of transfering mono recordings to stereo where just to copy the one mono mix into another channel and have the same mix simultaneuosly on two speakers (these are called "mono mixes" on reissues which had been treated with the method described next). the other way to transfer mono to stereo was to take the master tapes, recorded on two or more tracks and then processed to be bounced and mixed down to two tracks (with far better results).
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