NEW ORLEANS — Chris Owens, the singer, dancer and entertainer whose seven decades as a Bourbon Street performer and club owner made her a New Orleans icon known worldwide, died Tuesday.
Her longtime publicist Kitsy Adams confirmed Owens' death, saying she died at her St. Louis Street home of a heart attack.
Planning was underway for Owens’ annual Easter parade, which she had led since 1983. It will return to the French Quarter next week on Easter Sunday after a two-year pandemic hiatus. Adams said the parade will roll on in Owens’ honor.
Owens' longevity and boundless energy prompted frequent comments and guesses about her age, which she famously kept secret. Her stock response when asked: "A woman who will tell her age will tell anything."
When asked about it on Tuesday, Adams said Owens was "old enough to do what she wanted and young enough to still do it. Her number was unlisted."
But no matter the years, Owens’ youthful vitality remained. Her nonstop energy and tall, voluptuous figure still turned heads more than 65 years after she first hit the scene.
Owens’ nightclub in the 500 block of Bourbon Street has become a French Quarter landmark, popular with visitors even in recent years as Owens’ reduced her performance schedule and musical tastes changed.
Up until the coronavirus pandemic temporarily closed the club in 2020, Owens was a regular performer there several nights a week. She opened her first club on Bourbon Street in 1956.
"I've always loved to dance," Owens once told the Associated Press. "That's how it all got started, and that's what keeps it going. It's that special way your backbone slips when you feel the rhythm. I was born with that."
One of 8 children, Owens was born Christine Shaw on her father's ranch near Abilene, Texas. She came to New Orleans at 15 to visit an older sister.
Owens returned after high school and went to work for 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 was fascinated by the show girls and Latin rhythms. Although she was not a professional dancer, she learned the dance routines well enough to be invited on stage regularly.
Newspaper gossip columnist Walter Winchell famously saw her dancing with her husband at El Morocco in New York and wrote her up every day for a week in his column. The Saturday Evening Post did a feature on her, as did Town & Country, Newsweek and Variety.
In New Orleans, the couple became regulars at the Blue Room and Fountain Lounge of the Roosevelt Hotel before Sol Owens decided to purchase a club for Owens to perform in regularly herself.
"We had big crowds and more and more they would pack around the dance floor to watch Sol and me dance," Owens said. "So after a while we built a stage and I started dancing on it 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 Owens’ club remains to this day.
“Chris Owens, wife of Sol Owens, owner and operator of the 809 Club…leads the Maracca Club members at the 809 in dancing to red hot Latin rhythms,” wrote The New Orleans States in 1957. “There is always plenty of action at the 809 Club, particularly when Chris and other girls go into their cha cha routines.”
Chris Owens through the years
Over the years, as musical tastes changed, Owens’ act followed the trends, from Latin to country, jazz, disco and more – becoming New Orleans’ version of a Las Vegas-style show. Celebrities, politicos and thousands of visiting businessmen came to the club in droves.
"She dances, shimmies and throws in a few bumps and grinds," an Associated Press article once described Owens' Bourbon Street act. "A seasoned entertainer, she is quick to point out her show is exotic, but she's not an exotic dancer. 'I was never a stripper, but I guess people thought if you're on Bourbon Street dancing, you must be,' Owens said."
During her many decades as a Bourbon Street club owner and businesswoman, Owens became a French Quarter business leader, supporting many charitable causes and civic events.
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 is also immortalized with a life-sized bronze statue – holding a pair of maracas - in New Orleans Musical Legends Park on her beloved Bourbon Street.
Funeral arrangements have not been announced.