He was very talented and I’m sorry that he’s passed away.” Recalling her three years in The First Edition, Camacho said: “Kenny was part of a very special time in my life that I’ll never regret and always be grateful for.

Having retired from singing in the early 1990s, she now makes gold and silver jewelry in her studio at Balboa Park’s Spanish Village. She later moved to Europe and got a solo record deal in Germany. It got difficult the last year, because everyone’s egos got in the way.”Ĭamacho was with The First Edition from 1966 to 1969. “We did something like 27 television shows the first year we were together, including ‘The Smothers Brothers,’ ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ and ‘Laugh-In.’ We had a lot of fun the first two years. “Kenny was very talented and had a real knack for finding songs that would become hits,” Camacho recalled in a Saturday morning interview.

She sang on such New Edition hits as “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” “But You Know I Love You” and “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” which was later featured in the 1998 Coen Brothers’ film, “The Big Lebowski.” San Diego native Thelma Camacho was a band mate of Rogers in the New Christy Minstrels in the mid 1960s and then in The New Edition. He also sang on the 1985 all-star single, “We Are the World.”

Two of them, “Lady” and “Islands in the Stream” (a duet with Dolly Parton), also topped the U.S. He was the fourth of eight children in his family and got his start in music as a kid singing in his church choir.Īfter scoring a few pop hits in the late 1960s with his band, Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, he launched his solo career and went on to earn 21 No.

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