Owens has been on Bourbon Street since the 1960s when she and her husband opened her club up and she began performing.
NEW ORLEANS - Chris Owens, singer, dancer and entertainer whose seven decades of bourbon street artist and club owner made him a New Orleans icon known around the world, died Tuesday.
His longtime publicist Kitsie Adams confirmed Owens' death, saying he died of a heart attack in St. Louis Street.
Owens had plans underway for the annual Easter Parade, which he had led since 1983. It will return to the French Quarter on Easter Sunday next week after a two-year pandemic hiatus. Adams said the parade would continue in Owens' honor.
Owens' longevity and boundless energy led to frequent comments and speculations about his age, which he kept a secret. Her stock response when asked: "A woman who tells her age will tell anything."
When asked about it on Tuesday, Adams said Owens was "old enough to do what she wanted and still young enough to do. Her number was unlisted."
But no matter the years, Owens' youthful vitality remained. Her nonstop energy and tall, voluptuous figure were still on the scene more than 65 years later, when she first appeared.
Owens' nightclub in the 500 block of Bourbon Street has become a French Quarter landmark, also popular with visitors in recent years as Owens reduced his performance schedule and changed musical tastes.
Owens was a regular performer several nights a week until the coronavirus pandemic temporarily closed the club in 2020. He opened his first club on Bourbon Street in 1956.
"I've always loved dancing," Owens once told the Associated Press. "That's how it all started, and that's what keeps it going. When you feel the rhythm slip down your spine. I was born with that."
I am heart broken today. The legendary Chris Owens, the queen of Bourbon Street has passed away. I can’t begin to say what a loss this is to New Orleans and all of us who love her. pic.twitter.com/MRlkiviX7q
— Eric Paulsen WWL-TV (@EPaulsenWWL) April 5, 2022
One of 8 children, Owens was born to Christine Shaw on her father's farm near Abilene, Texas. She came to New Orleans at the age of 15 to visit an older sister.
Owens returned after high school and went on to work as a doctor. It was there that she met her late husband, millionaire car dealer Sol Owens, who died in 1979.
The couple traveled to Havana in the 1950s, and Owens became fascinated by show girls and Latin rhythms. Although she was not a professional dancer, she learned the dance routine well enough to be invited on stage regularly.
The newspaper's gossip columnist Walter Winchell saw her dancing with her husband at El Moroccan in New York and wrote to him every day for a week in his column. The Saturday Evening Post did a feature on it, as did Town & Country, Newsweek and Variety.
In New Orleans, the couple became regulars at the Roosevelt Hotel's Blue Room and Fountain Lounge, before Sol Owens decided to buy a club for Owens to perform regularly.
"We had huge crowds and more and more they would pack around the dance floor to see Soul and me dance," Owens said. "So after a while we built a stage and I started dancing on that instead of the dance floor. It just went from there."
That first club was called Club 809, at the corner of Bourbon and St. Louis Streets, where the Owens Club remains today.
In 1957 The New Orleans States wrote, "Chris Owens, Soul Owens' wife, owner and operator of the 809 Club ... leads the members of the Maraca Club at 809 to dance to red hot Latin rhythms." "There's always a lot of action in the 809 club, especially when Chris and the other girls go into their cha cha routines."
Chris Owens over the years
Over the years, as musical tastes changed, Owens' acting followed trends from Latin to country, jazz, disco and more - becoming the New Orleans version of a Las Vegas-style show. Celebrities, politicians and thousands of visiting businessmen flocked to the club in large numbers.
An Associated Press article once described Owens's Bourbon Street act as "she dances, sways and does some bumps and grinds." "A veteran entertainer, she's quick to point out that her show is exotic, but she's not an exotic dancer. 'I was never a stripper, but I think people thought if you danced on Bourbon Street So you should be,' Owens said.
During her many decades as a Bourbon Street club owner and business woman, Owens became a French Quarter business leader, supporting many charitable causes and civic programs.
She appeared regularly at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and other festivals. She also released an album and was featured in countless TV and media interviews.
Owens has been immortalized with a life-size bronze statue—holding a pair of maracas—on her beloved Bourbon Street in New Orleans Musical Legends Park.
Funeral arrangements have not been announced.