Silhouettes

To most ears the Silhouettes register as classic rock-and-roll one-hit acts, one more R&B vocal quartet that reached the top just once, courtesy of “Get a Job,” before vanishing from the national charts. In strict commercial terms that assessment holds: the quartet never again cracked the Billboard Hot 100 or R&B lists. Yet the four original members sustained careers on-stage and in the studio well into the late 1960s, always with at least two of the founders still present. The cultural footprint left by “Get a Job,” credited to Rick Lewis and the rest of the group, extends far beyond that single week at number one. For generations of listeners the track became the very definition of doo-wop, or at any rate one of the handful of records summoned whenever the phrase is uttered, even though purists sometimes dismissed it as caricature. The song also provoked creative responses from other artists; the Miracles answered with their own debut single, “Got a Job,” whose optimistic outlook stood in deliberate contrast to the original’s complaints and thereby helped set Motown apart from its rivals. Eleven years later, amid the Vietnam era and the afterglow of Woodstock, a troupe of retro-rock enthusiasts searching for a name borrowed the nonsense syllables from the Silhouettes’ backing chorus and christened themselves Sha Na Na.

The group’s story actually begins five years before “Get a Job,” in the early 1950s, when Earl Beal (born July 18, 1924) and Raymond Edwards (born September 22, 1922) assembled a gospel ensemble called the Balladeers that sang around Philadelphia and issued two singles in 1954. That same year Bill Horton (born December 25, 1929; died December 23, 1995) stepped in as lead vocalist in place of Clarence Basil, and the unit soon adopted the name Gospel Tornadoes. Further personnel shifts occurred; in 1956 Rick Lewis (born September 23, 1933) came aboard. Lewis had already sung in several gospel aggregations and had begun composing during his U.S. Army service. Although the Tornadoes enjoyed local popularity, gospel performance yielded scant income, prompting Lewis to urge the others to experiment with rock and roll.

Rechristened the Thunderbirds, they struggled to land a recording contract until they met Philadelphia disc jockey Kae Williams, who was launching his own imprint and heard them at a club date. Signed to Williams’s Junior Records, they cut their first side in autumn 1957: the ballad “I Am Lonely” was slated as the A-side, paired with the up-tempo “Get a Job,” a Lewis composition dating from his post-army period. Just before the session the singers learned that another Thunderbirds already existed; at Beal’s suggestion they took their new name from the 1957 Rays hit “Silhouettes.”

“I Am Lonely” b/w “Get a Job” appeared on Junior in November 1957. Dick Clark immediately programmed the record on American Bandstand, yet Williams recognized that his tiny local label lacked the capacity to meet national demand and therefore licensed it to Al Silver’s larger New York-based Herald-Ember operation. The move proved shrewd. “Get a Job” proved irresistible, its powerful vocals, driving rhythm, and series of six instantly memorable hooks—beginning with the “yip-yip-yip” introduction—capped by a notable tenor-sax solo from Ronnie McGill. Multiple Bandstand appearances followed between late 1957 and mid-1958, generating 200,000 advance orders after the first airing. The single ultimately reached the summit of both the Hot 100 and R&B charts, only the third doo-wop release to top the pop listings.

Follow-up releases fared poorly. “Headin’ for the Poorhouse” b/w “Miss Thing,” issued in early 1958, attracted scattered regional spins but failed to duplicate the earlier hooks. “Bing Bong” likewise missed the national charts despite respectable sales in New York and Philadelphia. Williams terminated his licensing arrangement with Ember, after which Ace Records issued two further singles that moved modestly without charting. The original Silhouettes stopped recording after 1958, citing dissatisfaction with Williams’s production choices and the minimal royalties that reached them despite the number-one hit.

By year’s end Horton and Edwards had departed; Lewis and Beal continued with John “Bootsie” Williams on lead and Cornelius “Brother” Brown on bass. Prospects brightened when producer Jerry Ragovoy signed the revised lineup and oversaw three modestly successful sides. Returning to Williams in 1963, they attempted to recapture the “Get a Job” formula with “Rent Man,” which sold locally on Junior but did not chart nationally. By 1966 the ever-changing collective performed as the New Silhouettes. In 1968 the Goodway label released the first Silhouettes LP, The Original and New Silhouettes ’58/’68 Get a Job, mixing vintage tracks with new material cut by the current members.

Ironically, the original group disbanded just as Sha Na Na rode the rock-and-roll revival wave under a name drawn from the Silhouettes’ signature song. The foursome therefore missed both the revival circuit and the oldies package tours that followed. Not until the 1980s did the founding members reunite, initially for a one-time appearance arranged by disc jockey Norm N. Nite. Audience response was strong enough to keep them active, partly for enjoyment and partly to restore their historical standing. Having learned hard lessons about the music business, they reclaimed the copyright to “Get a Job” when renewal time arrived in the mid-1980s and eventually recovered rights to all their compositions. The original quartet continued performing together until Horton’s death in 1995. Today the Silhouettes are counted among the most admired R&B harmony groups of the 1950s.