On a Saturday evening earlier this year, Cal State L.A. professor Ericka Verba and her former bandmates took the stage at Santa Monica’s Church in Ocean Park to perform a tribute to mid-20th century Chilean folk singer Violeta Parra.

What brought these musicians back together for the first time since the 1990s?

It was Verba’s new biography of Parra, a trailblazing musician. Verba’s book, “Thanks to Life,” is the culmination of a nearly lifelong fascination with Parra’s work. Verba, a professor and director of the Latin American studies program at Cal State L.A., says Parra has impacted her life. “One hundred percent,” she says.

“I just turned 65, so I can actually look back on my life,” she says, “And especially because I just had a concert with people that I’ve now known for three-quarters of my life, I have this real sense of how I got here that I couldn’t have had when I was going on the journey. I could have never known when I went to college that I would end up writing a book about Violeta Parra decades later.”

An influential life

For those unfamiliar with the artist, Parra was born in 1917 and had a long career that was full of reinvention. By the 1950s, she had turned towards folklore, collecting the songs of Chile as well as composing her own — this became the defining period of her career. She traveled in international circles, intersecting with established and emerging artists of the time, including Leonard Bernstein, Allen Ginsberg and film and comics legend Alejandro Jodorowsky.

“She’s in Leonard Bernstein’s memoirs,” says Verba, adding that the composer used one of the folk songs that Parra collected in his own work. “So, she even influenced his compositions.”

Parra’s body of work included songs about the struggles she saw, like “Arriba quemando el sol,” which documents life in the mining communities of northern Chile. “They’re songs of social witness,” says Verba, who compares Parra to Woody Guthrie insofar as their work influenced the generation of folk singers who came up in the 1960s. As Guthrie influenced Bob Dylan in the U.S., so was Parra an influence on Chilean singer Victor Jara.

Although Parra died in 1967, her own songs have thrived in the decades since. Her best-known composition, “Gracias a la Vida” (“Thanks to Life”), has been performed by numerous musicians, including Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, Plácido Domingo and Kacey Musgraves.

“Gracias a la Vida” also became a song of resistance in Chile during the 1984 protest against Augusto Pinochet’s regime. “She’s really lived on as a symbol of resistance, of voices that speak out against injustice. That’s one of the qualities of her legacy,” says Verba.

Songs of protest and liberation

As a teenager in 1970s Massachusetts, Verba befriended a family of Chilean artists and musicians. It was through them that she learned about the 1973 military coup that led to Pinochet’s dictatorship and first heard Chilean protest singers. “I learned my first Violeta Parra songs because she was considered the mother of this protest movement,” says Verba.

Later, at Brown University, Verba formed a band, Sabía, influenced by this music. The folk musicians eventually moved to Los Angeles and spent about a decade touring and doing solidarity work with Latin America. One year, the band spent eight months on the road, and on a Canadian tour it played 17 shows in 23 days, collecting tools for a drive to help the people of Nicaragua.

“There was no roadie,” she recalls. “I don’t know how we did it when I think back on it, but we did it.”

In 1996, thanks to a grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Verba was one of 14 musicians to play a Violeta Parra tribute concert, first at Barnsdall Park and then at Grand Performances.

But Verba wasn’t just playing Parra’s music. In 1980, Verba wrote her college thesis on Parra’s autobiography, which was written in a style of poetry known as the décima. The thesis proved to be helpful as Verba continued to research Parra’s life over the years.

“If I hadn’t done the work then of trying to understand what comes from tradition and how she blows up tradition to make it her own voice, I would have had to do the work now,” she says.Verba dug deeper into Parra’s life after she became a professor, but it still took years of research and early-morning writing sessions to complete the biography.

“This was really a project of love,” says Verba. “It’s just been so much fun because I think of it as a collective project.”

Gathering the details of Parra’s life involved making connections across the globe. Verba recalls connecting with a BBC archivist to track down a 1955 performance.

“He had never heard of her, but once he started learning about Violeta Parra, he found her incredibly interesting,” Verba says of the archivist, and that reaction is one she hopes more take away from “Thanks to Life.”

“I think the whole world should know about her,” she says.