Carmen Camacho is gone. She passed away on October 19, 2025.
To the Bikolanos who were around in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Carmen Camacho was the voice over the radio behind the Bikol songs that were being played over and over. By this time, the so-called Tagalog songs were being overrun by the more commercial and popular songs in English. The golden age of kundiman was practically gone. The age of Ruben Tagalog, Cenon Lagman, Sylvia la Torre and many other excellent singers were on the wane. The concert halls were the ones that kept the kundiman, danza, balitaw and other forms.
It would take another decade, a miraculous upswing of musical tradition that would bring back what felt like a renaissance of Tagalog and other songs in the vernacular.
It was around this time, when Carmen Camacho’s voice began to dominate the airlane in Naga radio stations-DZRB, DZDR, DZEB-that reached across the six provinces of the Bikol region. For many years in the late ’40s and ’50s, several generations of Bikolanos and Filipino listeners grew up with the themes of love lost and love regained and, yes, lost again to the ether of sorrow and forgetfulness.
Carmen Camacho was there with the Tres Rosas by themselves-the dulcet trio forever sweet in despair and in love; at times, they were paired with the Lovers Trio in a splendid combination out to produce love songs that teased, seduced, and celebrated harmonies as melodious, languid, and variably rhythmic. Singly, they were all great and able soloists; altogether, they need not look at each other to be able to sing as one. It was as if they knew in their veins a timing and phrasing that was impeccable.
Back in the region, we were rediscovering our old songs. Already embedded in books and school programs, the songs that were being sung for the first time over the radio were like treasures burnished, polished remarkably and inspected for the first time. It was as if we were legitimizing music that was forgotten.
It did not matter if Carmen Camacho had a piquant accent, after all she was from Catanduanes and sometimes her vowels grated, creating a glottal stop where the mainland Bikol perhaps softened them. She was singing our song and her vibrant, warm, velvet contralto had enough tears in the phrasing. She was singing all of them-from old warhorse of a love anthem by Potenciano Gregorio of Santo Domingo, Albay to the morbid cautionary lines of ‘Si Nanay, Si Tatay,’ For in Carmen Camacho’s version, who can endure these lines;
‘Ay Nanay, ay Tatay, kun ako maraot
My Mother, My Father, if I am not ideal
Pugutan nin payo, ibuntug sa lawud
Feel free to cut my head and leave it deep in the sea
Kun maheling mo man na nag anud-anod
And if ever you see it floating by
Ay Nanay, Ay Tatay, sapuda man tulos
Take it with your hands gently.
Carmen Camacho will not be forgotten by the Bikolanos because it is her voice that has provided lyrics- piquant and radical images-to the Pantomina, the social dance that appears in various forms all over the region. For a long, long time-even before Sorsogon transformed Pantomina, a dance performed during weddings, into a street dance-it was merely music, a composite of two melodies. There is one for the paso or the long walk and the ‘engano’ or the waltzing movement.
Interestingly, Carmen Camacho was not alone in singing the songs from the region; she was with the other singers. Raye Lucero, Nora Hermosa, later, Cely Bautista. They were singing songs in Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Bikolano. Carmen herself was singing many songs in other languages. We learned about these other songs from other places because these singers went out of their way to sing them. They sang them either as a chorus or as soloists, imbuing them with the soul as if they owned these melodies.
I had the privilege to be with Carmen Camacho and Raye Lucero together with Mike Coroza in their last visit to Naga City. Carmen and Raye proved to be generous individuals with their memories. They regaled me with stories from their long historic career. In the city plaza, they performed that night and they sang like there was no tomorrow.
Carmen is gone now. Cely Bautista passed on way ahead of her. It still remains a mystery for me that they-the Mabuhay Singers-have gone on unheralded. We have learned about the music of the many regions of this archipelago through them. If ever our hearts quicken when we remember a song, it could be because these wonderful beings sang them at one point-translating for us some lines, or embedding them in our consciousness the spirit of the nation.