“Ain’t No Sunshine” won the Grammy Award for best rhythm and blues song. “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us” (a collaboration with the saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., written with William Salter and Ralph MacDonald) won the same award.

Mr. Withers released six other studio albums in the 1970s, for Sussex and then Columbia, and performed across the country and beyond. One memorable appearance was at the music festival in Zaire in 1974 that preceded the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the heavyweight fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.

But he also played clubs like the Bottom Line in Manhattan.

“Mr. Withers’s lyrics are among the most thoughtful in all of pop music,” Robert Palmer wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a 1976 show there, “but his work also has its physical side. Many of his tunes simmer irresistibly, as if cooking over a low flame.”

Mr. Withers chafed at Columbia, clashing with executives, and after the release of “Watching You Watching Me” in 1985, he was done with the music business. Years later he liked to tell stories about not being recognized in public. One such incident occurred at a Los Angeles restaurant.

“Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles up on Pico,” he told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2015, “and these ladies looked like they had just come from church or something, and they were talking about this Bill Withers song. So I was going to have some fun with them. I said, ‘I’m Bill Withers,’ and this lady said: ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You too light-skinned to be Bill Withers.’”