Bob Dylan called her album Ballads and Blues "the first thing that turned me on to folk singing."

Joan Baez called her the Queen of Folk. "When I first met her," Baez said, "my knees went to jelly, and that doesn't happen to me very often."

The only praise that matters regarding whether you need to know this artist, though, came from Rosa Parks. When asked what songs inspire her most, the activist replied, "Essentially, all the songs Odetta sings."

If you don't know much about Odetta, she knows why — and she saw it coming. After the March on Washington in 1963, news reports featured footage of Dylan, Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, but maybe just a glimpse or two of Odetta, the artist who inspired them all...and who, not incidentally, actually happened to be African American.

John Seiter, who drummed with Odetta, tells biographer Ian Zack that when he mentions that fact, "some people have never heard of her. And you just go, what?"

That fact makes Zack's book all the more important. The scope of Odetta's achievement is remarkable, and it's both heartbreaking and infuriating to realize how the artist — who died in 2008, aged 77 — watched her own eclipse happen, starting with the part of the Folk Revival most people know about.

In popular memory, the Folk Revival started with Baez, whose self-titled 1960 debut was the first major commercial success to come out of the movement. Baez, though — whose family was Mexican-American, but whose light skin brought a measure of privilege — had a model of integrity and artistry in Odetta. While Baez's soprano was very different than Odetta's contralto, the latter artist presaged Baez's sincere delivery that plumbed folksongs for pure emotional depth.

After a decade of national acclaim, it was hard for Odetta to see the younger woman become the face of the newly hot genre. Years later, Odetta sat down with Baez to communicate frankly. "I told her about the resentments that I'd felt, and didn't feel that she was the focus of it; but I really did resent that the whole of society did whatever it did or didn't do for me, and she said she understood. But I had to tell her because whenever I'd meet her there was this barrier that she didn't work for, she didn't earn it."

Odetta Holmes was born in 1930 in Birmingham, Alabama. When she returned to Birmingham in 1965 to play a benefit for an arts center, a local white college student shrugged off the gig. "Folksinging is a fad in the North that hasn't reached here yet," he said to a reporter, seemingly oblivious that the face of the "fad" had in fact been born in Birmingham and was singing songs of the black Southern experience.

She spent most of her youth in Los Angeles, where she and her family moved with her new stepfather when Odetta was six. She made friends including a white girl who walked up to her on their first day and said, "I'm new too and I'm Jewish." The two girls supported one another in their outcast status, and Odetta joined an interracial community chorus as an early statement against segregation.

Her voice shone on every stage, and by college, Odetta was training in classical voice as well as making forays into musical theater. As a member of a touring show cast, she traveled to San Francisco, where she found the folk scene and decided it was time to pick up a guitar.

Odetta's star rose rapidly in the 1950s: the tall, strongly built performer mesmerized audiences and attracted mentors including singer Paul Robeson. She worked part time as a camp counselor, and one night in 1952 she made a startling request of her all-white cabin of campers: "Let's get some scissors. I want you to cut my hair."

Odetta became the first major black woman celebrity to wear the natural hair style that later became known as an Afro. She became the shining star of Harry Belafonte's 1959 CBS special, where, in the host's words, Odetta "wasn't trying to compete with the culture of the day. She was saying something else altogether: 'My blackness unadorned is in itself its own adorning.'"

Her career helped to launch the Folk Revival, and specifically a manager who became infamous within it: Albert Grossman, the svengali behind Bob Dylan's rise. Odetta was Grossman's first big success, and Zack seems inclined to agree that he ultimately limited her reach. While Dylan would bridge folk and rock, Odetta — for all her singular power, for all the fact that Dylan himself sent a tape with Spider John Koerner to give to Odetta, for all that she warmed Dylan with encouragement when he sang for her in Minneapolis in 1961 — would not be lifted by the same rising tide.

The irony is that while Dylan and Baez became the musical faces of the Civil Rights Movement for much of America's white population, it was Odetta who had lived, and was living, the struggle...and who inspired the protesters, including her friend and fan Martin Luther King Jr., in a special way. According to contemporary accounts, both Baez and Odetta sang "We Shall Overcome" at the March on Washington, but it was the Baez version that was widely reported, and that subsequently became a hit single.

Even many people who know and respect Odetta's music associate her most closely, or even exclusively, with her freedom songs of the '50s and early '60s; as Zack notes, though, Odetta's creative career took some fascinating turns in later years. This was often to the frustration of the artist, whose album of Dylan covers (she was the first to record several of his songs, including "Paths of Victory") and rock album were critically acclaimed but failed to make much of a dent on the charts.

She continued to sing, though, an enduringly powerful performer both for those who remembered her awe-inspiring mid-century peak and for those being newly introduced to her riveting stage presence. After numerous attempts to make an impact with blues performances, Odetta did have a rewarding resurgence in the '90s: two of her three Grammy nominations came in the last decade of her life, including one for a 1999 blues album, and that same year she was presented with a National Medal of the Arts.

Bestowing the medal, Bill Clinton called Odetta "the reigning queen of American folk music," but she'd hesitated before accepting his invitation to the White House, mindful of his "tough on crime" policies that were filling prisons with black men and women.

"I thought, this is a medal from the nation," she ultimately decided. "He just happens to be the president presenting the medal."

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Tune in to The Current at 8:30 a.m. (Central) every Wednesday morning to hear Jay Gabler and Jill Riley talk about a new book. Also, find Jay's reviews online.

June 24: Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary by Sasha Geffen (buy now)

July 1: America the Band: An Authorized Biography by Jude Warne (buy now)

July 8: Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (buy now)

July 15: Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt (buy now)