In his early teens Owens spent a year with a traveling tent show as a blackface singer. By his late teens he left music and found work in the Texas oilfields, and in Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado as a farmhand and mechanic. For a time, he was a lawman in Bridgeport, Oklahoma.
He was brought back to music in Lamar, Colorado, while he was hospitalized for an appendectomy. A group of children (five of whom had frozen to death before being rescued) who had been stranded in a blizzard were brought into the hospital, and he entertained them by singing songs. Their appreciative reaction pulled him back into music. After performing in medicine shows with his two daughters, he became known as "The Original Texas Ranger" on radio station KMBC in Kansas City, Missouri. His Brush Creek Follies show there lasted for more than eleven years and became nationally famous.[1] He made many other radio appearances, hosting the Boone County Jamboree on WLW in Cincinnati.[2]
In 1943 Owens moved to Hollywood and began to appear in films. During the shooting of the 1948 John Wayne movie Red River, his horse fell on him and he broke his back, an injury from which he never fully recovered.[1] He retired from movies in the 1950s and moved to Texas, where he died of a heart attack in 1962, aged 70. In 1971, Tex Owens was posthumously inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.[3]
Owens's daughter, Laura Lee Owens (1920-1989) was the first female vocalist to tour with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She later married band leader Dickie McBride and performed with him as Laura Lee McBride. In the 1970s, she toured with Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours.[4]
