It’s hard to forget your first brush with Betty Davis, even if the encounter was based solely on the sleeves to her rare studio albums (or on the cover of “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” the 1968 album by her husband of a year, the trumpeter Miles Davis). There was her self-titled debut from 1973, featuring Betty giggling in prototype Daisy Dukes, thigh-high silver moon boots, all of it topped off by an Afro that threatened the perimeter of a 12-inch sleeve. The next year, “They Say I’m Different” was truth in advertising, with Ms. Davis now clad in some high-collared Egyptology onesie, with a clutch of space javelins in her hands. (A third album, “Nasty Gal,” was perhaps too up-front, with a mascara-smeared Davis open-mouthed and cockkneed in a negligee.)

Those who came across these albums and the raw funk contained therein were no doubt left panting, spent. Thankfully, due to the diligent efforts of the Seattle-based imprint Light in the Attic (responsible last year for unearthing Canadian reggae as well as an album by starcrossed Greenwich Village folk singer Karen Dalton), a new generation of innocent minds can be devastated by Ms. Davis’s particular strain of sexuality. The label’s recent re-issues of her self-titled debut and “They Say I’m Different” are chock full of revelatory liner notes and breathless testimony from such pop icons as Rick James, Herbie Hancock, and Carlos Santana. Even her ex chimes in posthumously: “If Betty were singing today she be something like Madonna, something like Prince,” Miles Davis said in the 1980s. “She was the beginning of all that.” In their brief time together, Betty was also responsible for turning Miles onto Jimi Hendrix’s rock and Sly Stone’s funk, auguring her husband’s jazzaltering albums “Bitches’ Brew” and “On the Corner.”

Had Betty Davis only written her first pop hit (the Chambers Brothers’ “Uptown”) at age 22 and married a jazz icon twice her age at 23, she’d still be remembered. But her own albums were prophetic as well. Her debut featured the rhythm section from Sly & the Family Stone and backup singers who would go on to define 1970s funk and disco, like Sylvester and the Pointer Sisters. On cuts like “If I’m in Luck, I Might Get Picked Up” and “Game Is My Middle Name,” Ms. Davis flaunts a feminine sexuality that even in the post-’60s climate of free love and budding feminism was far off the seismic scale not just in pop music, but in popular culture. It would take decades for her sassy blueprint to actually get built, but in hindsight, it’s easy to trace Ms. Davis’s influence on funk and on the men and women of hip-hop: She is sampled and revered by such hip-hop trailblazers as Ice Cube, the Roots, Prince Paul, and Talib Kwali, and is the role model for Missy Elliot, Lil Kim, and Joi.

And yet for all of Betty Davis’s outsize, extroverted, libidinous persona, these critical reissues reveal that beneath the veneer is a painfully trapped woman. Devoted listners who are entranced and turned on by her tales of strutting the street against the raw strain of punk-laced funk find the tables are frequently turned. Sure, there are instances of asserting control on songs like “Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him” and “He Was a Big Freak,” in which she whips her man “with a turquoise chain,” but for all the negligees, feather boas, thigh-high boots, and outward shows of power, there’s a palpable pain that ultimately connects all of her “empowered” female protagonists.

You can hear it in the first minute of her debut, on “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up,” with Ms. Davis’s voice breaking on the line “All you lady-haters don’t be cruel to me.” Wavering on that last syllable, Ms. Davis exposes a crack in that sexy façade, a desperation beneath the wanton exterior. For all of her conquests, a girl still wakes up lonely on “70s Blues,” while “Don’t You Call Her No Tramp” becomes increasingly vitriolic with each chorus.

“Steppin’ Out in Her I. Miller Shoes” sees Ms. Davis alternate her limited vocal range between scratchy screams and kittenish mewls as she tells of a girl who “could’ve been anything that she wanted … instead she chose to be nothing,” spiraling downward into dark glasses and dark marks on her arms. Though fashionably dressed and sexually commanding, Ms. Davis forces us to see the victim underneath — indignant and unheard, her voice sounds less like a raspy come-on than one made raw from screaming for justice.