The day he buried his mother in Augusta, Georgia, in the cemetery where he’d buried his father and his third wife, James Brown draped an arm around Roosevelt Royce Johnson’s shoulders and pointed at a plot of unturned earth. “Well, Mr Johnson,” he said, “that’s my spot right there. What you gonna put on my headstone?” What’s a man to say to that?

Johnson had known Brown since he was 12 and fetching coffee for the DJs at WJMO 1490 radio station in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1960s. Brown made it his business to know the people who could play his records. Johnson remembers watching a little man with an improbable swoop of hair come down the steps of his private jet. Blew Johnson’s mind. A black man with his own plane. Damn. “Hold my coat,” he told Johnson.

And that’s what Johnson did for 40 years. On tour, he would lay out Brown’s pyjamas at night, iron his clothes in the morning and make sure he had an aspirin with breakfast and 50mg of Viagra before every show. (“He thought it gave him extra energy.”) He sang backing vocals, too, on stage with the Godfather. By the time Brown’s mother was laid to rest in the winter of 2004, Brown was almost 71. His hair was bone white under the black dye, and he had cancer on his prostate. But he was still working, still touring, still paying Johnson $3,300 per week on the road.

What you gonna put on my headstone? “I’m not gonna put nothin’ on it,” Johnson said. “I’m gonna leave you behind.” Which didn’t happen: Johnson is still here to tell stories about Brown, who died on Christmas Day, 2006. But there is nothing on his headstone. There is no headstone. Brown is in a temporary crypt surrounded by a fence outside the house in South Carolina where one of his daughters lives. “Like a pet,” Johnson says. “That’s something you do with a dog.”

Times Archive, 1971: James Brown at the Albert Hall

James Brown is the pop world's equivalent of Cassius Clay

In August 2000, Brown had drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his personal and household effects to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear that those were the only heirs he intended to favour. “I have intentionally failed to provide for any other relatives or other persons,” he wrote in the will. “Such failure is intentional and not occasioned by accident or mistake.”

Everything else he owned, including his 60-acre estate in Beech Island, South Carolina, and his catalogue of 800 or so songs, was to remain in a trust, divided into two funds: one to educate his grandchildren (seven from those six named children, plus the daughter of his son Teddy, who died in 1973) and a much larger one to pay tuition for “financially needy” students in South Carolina or Georgia. How much is that trust worth? The low estimate is $20m. In other words, Brown left a fortune to poor strangers.

Nineteen months later, none of them have seen a penny. Nor will they for months, or years, to come, by which point there may be little left, after the creditors and the lawyers are paid. The first attorney was hired barely 36 hours after Brown died, and the first legal challenge was initiated less than two weeks after that. The lawsuits rapidly multiplied – there are now more than 30 lawyers suing in three different courts –which, predictably, has resolved nothing.

For such a simple will there are a stupefying number of issues to resolve. Brown’s ostensible widow and the mother of James Brown II wants at least a third of his riches – though, as a matter of law, she is almost certainly not his widow, and the child is almost certainly not his. Five of the six children named want the will invalidated, which would entitle them to equal shares of the entire estate. That puts them at odds with the sixth sibling, Terry, and his boys, Forlando and Romunzo, who want the will to stand. At least two other daughters whom Brown never acknowledged also want a share of the pot, as well as 18 years of backdated child support. Four more potential children may have similar claims.

The three men Brown named as trustees have resigned, though two of them, Albert H “Buddy” Dallas and Alford Bradley, want to be reinstated, because they say a judge persuaded them to quit. That same judge, Doyet Early, wants to put the third former trustee, David Cannon, in jail for not repaying $373,000 in misappropriated funds. Cannon says he can’t afford it, which looks bad considering he spent almost $900,000 in cash to build a house in Honduras last year.

The two special administrators Judge Early appointed to replace those three men, meanwhile, are being sued by Forlando Brown, who argues that they were illegally put in charge and are improperly attempting to shift assets from the trust to the estate, from which their $300-an-hour fees could be paid. The administrators, Adele Pope and Robert Buchanan, have in turn sued Bradley, Cannon, Dallas, the entertainment lawyer Joel Katz, his firm, Greenberg Traurig, and Enterprise Bank in state court, alleging a years-long conspiracy to swindle millions from Brown.

All of those people have at least one lawyer. Tomi Rae Hynie, the “widow”, has five. Her son has his representative, a legal guardian, who has his own lawyer. Pope and Buchanan have lawyers. Even the anonymous beneficiaries of the trust, all those needy and deserving would-be students, have a lawyer. And those are the relatively dignified legal proceedings.

Outside the courtroom, the family has bickered over everything, including the disposition of Brown’s body, which for a time was kept in a gold-plated coffin inside a climate-controlled room in his house. When it was decided that the corpse would be put in a crypt in his daughter Deanna’s garden in March, his daughter Yamma nearly missed the private ceremony because police in Atlanta had arrested her the night before for stabbing her husband in the arm with a butcher’s knife. Since then, Forlando Brown has accused Deanna and Yamma of swiping mementos, cheques, and tens of thousands in cash from his grandfather’s house.

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