“So that was the first line,” he added.

Mr. Willis may have been the Village People’s frontman, but the band was the idea of Jacques Morali, a composer, and Henri Belolo, a music executive. In 1977, the two men were at a gay club in the West Village neighborhood of New York when they noticed a bartender dressed in an outfit resembling a Native American and another dressed as a cowboy. Soon, they decided to create a disco band featuring singers dressed as American male archetypes.

Mr. Morali and Mr. Belolo met Mr. Willis when the arranger who was working with them on another of their projects suggested bringing in Mr. Willis for backing vocals, according to the Village People’s official biography. Afterward, Mr. Morali told Mr. Willis that he had “had a dream that you sang lead vocals on an album I produced and it went very, very big,” and asked him to front the group that would become the Village People.

The band debuted in 1977 with a self-titled four-track album and went on to have numerous hits. Mr. Willis left in 1980 and did not appear in the group’s flop movie released that year, “Can’t Stop the Music.” He later returned, but left again in 1983.

Mr. Willis married twice. His first marriage, in 1978, was to Phylicia Rashad, the actress known for her starring role on “The Cosby Show.” The couple divorced in 1982. He married Karen Huff-Willis, an attorney and entertainment executive, in 2007. She survives him, but information about his other survivors was not immediately available.

In his 2015 interview with The Union-Tribune, Mr. Willis said he had spent much of the 1980s and 1990s “kind of drugged out because I was disappointed with the way things were and got frustrated, and gave up for a bit.”

In 2015, he released a solo album, “Solo Man,” that he had originally recorded in 1979. Two years later, he returned to the Village People, having secured his share of copyright payments.

In the Union-Tribune interview, Mr. Willis reflected on his long career. “I hope to be remembered as that guy who got out of the music business, but never gave up,” he said, “and came back — came back successfully — and did something for people to smile about.”