....His book also includes scary incidents with the police or with white men who saw him driving or dancing with white women.

But the most devastating episode in Mr. Berry's life was his trial and conviction in 1961 for violating the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of women or girls across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. Mr. Berry was convicted of charges involving Janice Norine Escalanti, a 14-year-old hat-check girl. (She complained to the police after Mr. Berry fired her from her job at his St. Louis club, Club Bandstand.)

Mr. Berry's 20-month imprisonment left him broken and outraged. He said he felt hounded by the police because of his association with white women.

...."Never saw a man so changed," Carl Perkins, the songwriter, singer and guitarist, once told Michael Lydon, a journalist, as he recalled a 1964 tour of Britain with Mr. Berry. "He had been an easygoing guy before, the kinda guy who'd jam in dressing rooms, sit and swap licks and jokes. In England he was cold, real distant and bitter. It wasn't just jail. It was those years of one-nighters; grinding it out like that can kill a man. But I figure it was mostly jail."

....Born Charles Edward Anderson Berry on Oct. 18, 1926, he grew up in his family's three-room brick cottage at 2250 Goode Avenue, "a nicely kept area in the best of the three colored sections of St. Louis," he recalled later. The neighborhood, known as the Ville, was a thriving black community north and west of downtown St. Louis. Mr. Berry's parents, Henry and Martha, came from polyglot roots: African, Chihuahua Indian and European. His father worked in a flour mill and later as a repairman in apartment buildings.

....Judging by his candid autobiography, which he wrote without the help of a ghostwriter, Mr. Berry was stirred by two forces in his early years (and his late years, too): sex and music. "My 12th was my most Christian and most boring year of my life," Mr. Berry writes. "Try as I did, day after day, to cling to righteousness, I was washed down in suds of sinful surroundings."

His earliest influences were boogie-woogie, blues and swing. He spent hours listening to the bluesmen Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Arthur Crudup and Muddy Waters, and later to Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, Buddy Johnson, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Harry James and Nat King Cole.

"Nat Cole's diction, his speech and his delivery was something that I can't get from a lot of rappers today," Mr. Berry said backstage. "And a lot of that country-western - can't hear what they're saying."

....At the Cosmopolitan, Mr. Berry worked up a repertory of boogies and blues but also played around with the lyrics of old country songs. "Some of the clubgoers started whispering, `Who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?' " Mr. Berry recalls in his autobiography. "After that, they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed trying to dance to it."