Blowfly was a loose-tongued character, but even though his subject matter was provocative, his early music was as disciplined as Miami’s mainstream soul; it was often played by the same musicians. Shock was his stock in trade: Just as a song began to feel familiar, he inserted his crazy lyrics, to uproarious effect.

From early in his career, Mr. Reid mixed a kind of rhythmic talking into his music, borrowing the tempo of the patter he heard on black Southern radio stations. The results made him a kind of rap innovator, long before the genre had a commercial presence. In 1980 he released the gloriously raunchy “Rapp Dirty,” which he said he had written more than a decade earlier, and which became a touchstone for a future wave of profane, eccentric rappers.

In both his parodies and his original compositions, Mr. Reid was lascivious but good-natured. Even at his most extreme, there was nothing harsh about him. While his songs painted him as a libertine and rascal, in real life he was religious — he had memorized the Bible, Mr. Bowker said — and rarely drank or did drugs.

In an interview in the 2011 documentary “The Weird World of Blowfly,” directed by Jonathan Furmanski, Mr. Reid said he began making up his dirty songs as a child as a way of needling white people. “It backfired on me,” he said. “Everybody else wanted to please the crackers. I wanted to make ’em mad.” Instead, the very audience he wanted to annoy gave him money and, by extension, a career.

As Blowfly, Mr. Reid created an implicitly radical counternarrative to the more polite strains of soul that were popular at the time. Blowfly’s music has been widely sampled, and his influence is heard, directly and indirectly, in the work of R. Kelly, 2 Live Crew, Snoop Dogg, DJ Quik and Weird Al Yankovic. Chuck D of Public Enemy, in the documentary, says “Rapp Dirty” was the inspiration for that group’s agit-rap hit “Fight the Power.”

Mr. Reid struggled with finances in his later years. In 2003, he sold the rights to his publishing catalog to pay debts. “A million dollars tomorrow ain’t worth a damn if you can’t get $200 to live today,” he says in “Weird World.” In 2014, he raised money on a crowdfunding site to save his house from foreclosure.