Owens was credited with helping to spread the twangy 'Bakersfield sound’ of country music as an antidote to Nashville's slicker style.
His keyboard player Jim Shaw said Owens died from heart failure the night after he'd performed his regular show at his entertainment complex, Buck Owens' Crystal Palace.
Owens' landed his first top ten hit in 1960 with Under Your Spell Again, and throughout the decade he scooped 15 number ones including I've Got a Tiger By the Tail, and My Heart Skips a Beat.
He signed to host the country comedy television show Hee Haw in 1968 in a move many saw as career-damaging.
But he was well-paid and a shrewd businessman.
"He was one of the true innovators," Shaw said.
"He did it his own way, an outside gunslinger type who used his own band and made music in Hollywood rather than Nashville. That free spirit made him important to a lot of people."
Owens honed his craft in the rowdy bars of Bakersfield, a gritty oil and farming town about 160 kilometres north of Los Angeles.
He played it loud and kept it simple, performing tunes that were more escapist than the hard life tales of his Bakersfield colleague Merle Haggard.
"In Nashville, they were producing things with softer, more syrupy sounds," Owens told biographer Nicholas Dawidoff in the book In the Country of Country. "I'm one of those turn-on-the-damn-thing-and-here-we-go folks."
A song Owens made a hit, Act Naturally, was recorded by the Beatles with drummer Ringo Starr on vocals in 1965, the same year that Ray Charles enjoyed a top 10 pop hit with a cover of Owens' Cryin' Time.
Creedence Clearwater Revival mentioned Owens in the song Looking Out My Back Door and the Grateful Dead cited him as a major influence.
Country singer Dwight Yoakam teamed with Owens in the late '80s for a duet on a hit remake of Streets of Bakersfield.
"We're going to miss ol' Buck but we're going to bring him back tonight," said Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir.
He said he would play a tribute to Owens in a Philadelphia show by the Dead spin-off band Ratdog.