Good point.
I don't know the answer, but wasn't there a
Dixieland-jazz banjo equivalent of the chop chord in the
1920s or so?
FWIW, I found the following mandolin-related quote at (of all the unlikely places)
TheSession,
in a discussion about mandolin chop chords:
"Fifth interval tuning was what made the tenor banjo so useful in dixieland jazz - its harsh chords could easily cut through a front row of trumpets saxes and clarinets.
"The mandolin's chords have the same characteristics."
Of course, that's not exactly a bluegrass website
being quoted there, so who knows... that's just what turned up in 20 seconds of Googling. Other writers at that site then proceeded to get into interesting technicalities of exactly which type of banjo was used - "plectrum banjo" vs the shorter scale "tenor banjo" - but I'd say that whichever it was, it could have been an influential factor in Bill Monroe's decisions as to how to play that mandolin.
As to when
guitars got in on the action, I have no idea but wasn't
Django Reinhardt using something similar in the 1930s? I know almost zero about jazz history though... I would presume/guess that, for the larger louder jazz ensembles with all those noisy horns etc, guitars wouldn't have stood a chance of being heard without some sort of electric pickup, if that helps to date the adoption of guitars over banjos...
Are there any jazz experts reading this thread who can provide a timeline to help answer the other poster's question about when
guitars started doing the equivalent of
chop chords?
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(I suppose it's likely that this has already been discussed and answered sometime/somewhere else in the history of the internet,
but I am not aware of where those answers are. Enlightenment welcome.)
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