In Eureka Springs, people know Gayle de la Houssaye, also known as Gayle de la Kruse, as an artist and folk musician. For many years, her home on Hillside Ave. was a mecca for musicians playing in the Ozark Folk Festival, Eureka Springs Blues Festival, and other events.
“I can’t tell you the number of songs that were written at my kitchen table,” Gayle said. “I can’t begin to describe what festivals used to be like. Many of the musicians stayed with me. They were hanging from every rafter. My house was a hub for a lot of music those days. People would be running around putting on vintage outfits getting ready for gigs all over town. I always had a big pot of gumbo on the stove.”
Gayle was born in New Orleans in 1951 to a family with roots in South Louisiana traditions going back to the early 1800s. Some of her earliest memories are of her mother singing and playing the piano. Gayle started her music career when her daddy gave her a Gibson acoustic guitar when she was 17.
She was also attracted to art, and in the early 1970s studied at the John McCrady School of Fine and Applied Arts in the French Quarter. After art school, she worked restoring collectable antique Oriental rugs at Morton’s Antiques while building her career as an artist and musician. She found out it was easier making money as a musician than as an artist.
After marrying Tom Kruse, Gayle adopted Gayle de la Kruse as her stage name, and later became known as “The Rose of New Orleans.” In 1979, she, Tom and Cloud Henri, their five-month-old son, moved from New Orleans up to Eureka Springs in a gypsy wagon named Big Mamu, built on a 1946 Ford hay truck, with their restored 1962 Ford Falcon station wagon pulled behind. They weren’t initially planning on making Eureka Springs their home. But when the tow bar broke, they ended up camping at Beaver Lake and visiting Morgan Real Estate. They found and purchased a dilapidated house on Hillside.
“While the house was torn up and getting renovated, I would go home with Cloud to visit with my mama and daddy who were still living in the same house out by Lake Pontchartrain,” she said. “I honed my guitar playing skills playing with my mentor, Svare Forsland. Another friend, Larry Beard, was working for Paul Perette, Jr., a dentist who was also a sculptor. Larry recommended me as the model for a bronze statue that had been commissioned for the Louisiana World Exposition in 1984. Perette had done a drawing of a barefooted girl sitting on the edge of a fountain.”
The process worked by wax molds being made of different parts of Gayle’s body when she was 33 years old. While it sounds exotic to be cast in bronze, she describes it as torturous. It was a difficult pose to maintain for long periods of time.
“It was hard,” she recalls. “I would leave with permanent felt pen markings on me, and Vaseline and plaster hanging from my hair. It took quite a few sessions casting my legs, torso, arms, hands and feet. They did my face almost like a mask. One session as they were casting my arms, I sneezed and ruined all the work from that day. So, it had to be redone. I was being very careful not to ruin it again and sat back on my hands so long that they went numb. That did some lasting damage. It was weeks before I had feeling in my hands again. In the nick of time, I got the feeling back just a few days before my first performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.”
The artist named the statue after his daughter, Michelle. Michelle was placed on a fountain at the end of Dutch Alley on the Riverwalk near the Café du Monde. For many years few people knew who had modeled for it. Thousands of tourists had their picture taken with the sculpture, and a certain mystique grew up around it. Some people thought she was a mermaid. Others said they thought she was a prostitute because of the skimpy shorts, her form-revealing t-shirt and bare feet. Different legends were made up about her. Some considered her magical.
Then, after Hurricane Ida, people noticed that Michelle had disappeared. That fueled a lot of speculation. Was she destroyed by the hurricane? Was she stolen? There were even rumors linking her disappearance to removal of Confederate statues at the time. Perhaps Michelle was no longer politically correct?
But it turned out that the City of New Orleans had removed Michelle from display after she was vandalized with paint. It would be a couple years before she was restored and placed back at the Riverfront.
Some friends make it a sort of pilgrimage to go visit Gayle’s statue when they are in New Orleans. Cloud has always found it very endearing. Who else has a mama who has a statue of her in the French Quarter?
There were actually two statues made from the wax models of Gayle. The artist made a nude model of her that was part of the Louisiana World Exposition. Gayle was told the statue would have her wearing shorts and a t-shirt, not that there would be two statues and one would be of her nude.
“But I didn’t care about nude posing,” she said. “Having been an art student, I did it for the sake of art. The sculpture was dedicated to his daughter. It was never about me. It was about him and Michelle. But that doesn’t matter. Michelle has now watched the world go by for 40 years. I have had a lot of pictures sent to me of people posing next to her.”
Gayle also posed twice for Enrique Alférez, a prominent Mexican artist who specialized in sculpting the human form. He has a number of sculptures in City Park and in prominent places elsewhere in the world.
Gayle has great memories of her decades playing at the Eureka Springs Historic Hotels, the Basin Park bandshell, the Auditorium and various other venues She has an album called One More for the Road and a YouTube channel, Druid Priestess, that includes videos of musicians she was closely affiliated with, some of whom are now at the Big Jam Session in the sky.
How does she feel about being memorialized? “New Orleans lives in my heart and I’m glad I’ve had a perch to watch as time sashays by,” Gayle said.