Rosslyn Mountain Boys was a band that backed up a number of nationally-known singers, and released two albums of their own.

Joe Tripplet was a member of the Washington D.C. counterculture band Claude Jones with Happy Acosta and Jay Sprague. Joe and Happy began performing as an acoustic duo calling themselves the Rosslyn Mountain Boys (RMB). The RMB made a decision to go electric and invited Peter Bonta of The Nighthawks

The Nighthawks

The Nighthawks are an American blues and roots music band, based in Washington, D.C. The Nighthawks currently are Mark Wenner , Paul Bell , Johnny Castle , and Mark Stutso...

 join as bass player, along with Bob Berberich from Grin

Nils Lofgren

Nils Hilmer Lofgren is an American rock music recording artist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist...

 on drums . Tommy Hannum on pedal-steel guitar, who had been working with Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris is an American singer-songwriter and musician. In addition to her work as a solo artist and bandleader, both as an interpreter of other composers' works and as a singer-songwriter, she is a sought-after backing vocalist and duet partner, working with numerous other artists including...

, rounded out the band When Jay Sprague also came aboard from Claude Jones, Peter was able to move over to keyboards and guitar.

The Rosslyn Mountain Boys opened for and backed up stars such as Emmylou Harris, Conway Twitty

Conway Twitty

Conway Twitty , born Harold Lloyd Jenkins, was an American country music artist. He also had success in early rock and roll, R&B, and pop music. He held the record for the most number one singles of any act with 55 No. 1 Billboard country hits until George Strait broke the record in 2006...

, Tammy Wynette

Tammy Wynette

Virginia Wynette Pugh, known professionally as Tammy Wynette , was an American country music singer-songwriter and one of the genre's best-known artists and biggest-selling female vocalists....

, Vassar Clements

Vassar Clements

Vassar Clements was a Grammy Award- winning American jazz, swing, and bluegrass fiddler. Clements has been dubbed the Father of Hillbilly Jazz, an improvisational style that blends and borrows from swing, hot jazz, and bluegrass along with roots also in country and other musical...

, Bill Anderson, Jerry Lee Lewis

Jerry Lee Lewis

Jerry Lee Lewis is an American rock and roll and country music singer-songwriter and pianist. An early pioneer of rock and roll music, Lewis's career faltered after he married his young cousin, and he afterwards made a career extension to country and western music. He is known by the nickname 'The...

, Loretta Lynn

Loretta Lynn

Loretta Lynn is an American country music singer-songwriter, author and philanthropist. Born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky to a coal miner father, Lynn married at 13 years old, was a mother soon after, and moved to Washington with her husband, Oliver Lynn. Their marriage was sometimes tumultuous; he...

 and Buck Owens

Buck Owens

Alvis Edgar Owens, Jr. , better known as Buck Owens, was an American singer and guitarist who had 21 No. 1 hits on the Billboard country music charts with his band, the Buckaroos...

.

The RMB called it quits in 1979 and the members went in various directions. Peter was a member of Artful Dodger before opening Wally Cleaver's Recordings in Fredericksburg, Virginia

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Fredericksburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia located south of Washington, D.C., and north of Richmond. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 24,286...

, Tommy Hannum relocated to Nashville

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...

 and has been Ricky Van Shelton

Ricky Van Shelton

Ricky Van Shelton is a currently retired American country music artist. Active between 1986 and 2006, he has charted more than twenty singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts...

's band leader and an in-demand session player for some years while Peter Bonta and Rico Petrocelli, the last RMB bassist, went on to record and tour with Mary Chapin Carpenter

Mary Chapin Carpenter

Mary Chapin Carpenter is an American folk and country music artist. Carpenter spent several years singing in Washington, D.C. clubs before signing in the late 1980s with Columbia Records, who marketed her as a country singer...

.

The cover of the Rosslyn Mountain Boys album showed the band in a glade, with the 1970s skyline of Rosslyn, Virginia

Rosslyn, Virginia

Rosslyn is an unincorporated area in Northern Virginia located in the northeastern corner of Arlington County, Virginia, north of Arlington National Cemetery and directly across the Potomac River from Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Rosslyn encompasses the Arlington neighborhoods of North Rosslyn...

 in Arlington County, directly opposite Georgetown

Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Georgetown is a neighborhood located in northwest Washington, D.C., situated along the Potomac River. Founded in 1751, the port of Georgetown predated the establishment of the federal district and the City of Washington by 40 years...

, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 on the Potomac River

Potomac River

The Potomac River flows into the Chesapeake Bay, located along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. The river is approximately long, with a drainage area of about 14,700 square miles...

, grafted in behind them. This neighborhood of coal yards, pawn shops, a brewery, and trolley connections, had suddenly been developed upwards in the 1960s when Washington building codes restricting the height of structures in the district, forced developers of office towers to hop across the river to the Old Dominion

Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

.

Discography

• The Rosslyn Mt. Boys, Gene Rosenthal's Adelphi label, 1977
• Lone Outsider, Schizophonic Records, 1981
• Different Skyline, Sosumi Records, 2006.