LOS ANGELES (AP) - Singer Buck Owens, the flashy rhinestone cowboy who shaped the sound of country music with hits like Act Naturally and brought the genre to TV on the long-running Hee Haw, died Saturday, a spokesman said. He was 76.
Owens died at his home, said family spokesman Jim Shaw. The cause of death was not immediately known. Owens had undergone throat cancer surgery in 1993 and was hospitalized with pneumonia in 1997.
His career was one of the most phenomenal in country music, with a string of more than 20 No. 1 records, most released from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.
They were recorded with a honky-tonk twang that came to be known throughout California as the Bakersfield Sound, named for the town 160 kilometres north of Los Angeles that Owens called home.
