One-hit wonder Rick Lewis

Get a Job, a poor man's lament set to rock music, was written by Richard "Rick" Lewis during his time in the U.S. Army in Korea. Lewis was wounded in action and in 1954 returned to the States. He had done some gospel singing on Armed Forces Radio and continued this type work in Philadelpia with a group having the unlikely name The Gospel Tornadoes. Changing the group's name to The Silhouettes, the group cut a non-religious rock record. The side they thought would do well was the forgettable "I Am Lonely." To their surprise, the flip side, Get A Job, caught on big in 1957 and sold something like 2 million copies. It captured with both humor and poignancy the plight of many a poor black man in a discriminatory America--failing to find even temporary work and having to return home to his wife rejected and embarrassed to "hear that woman's mouth, preachin' and cryin,' tell me I was lyin' about a job that I never could find." Lewis sang the number with the group, although Bill Horton did the lead.

The Silhouettes kept singing into the early 1990s and were mainly considered a doo-wop group. Lewis outlived the rest of the original Silhouettes but died in 2005 of multiple organ failure.