Smash hit

Yamma, Deanna and their half-brother Daryl accused the former trustees of hunting for “certain assets” when the trustees photographed the woods around Brown’s house, an obvious reference to cash it is believed Brown buried in the garden. Tomi Rae Hynie, who prefers to be called Mrs Brown, was locked out of the house; she insists someone shredded more recent wills that she believes left half of Brown’s assets to her and her son. “They looted everything,” she says.

Even the lawyer who drew up the contested will and trust is a tawdry little sideshow: he is in prison for the 2006 murder of a strip-club manager who’d bounced him for masturbating naked while waiting for a $300 lap dance.

There’s more. There are claims against the estate from creditors and would-be creditors. The funeral home wants $17,995. One of Brown’s managers wants a $200,000 cut of royalties. Buddy Dallas says he is owed $624,876 in fees. The Pullman Group, to which Brown mortgaged his royalties in 1999, wants $31m.

A doctor wants $8,500 to reimburse her for, among other things, the times she packed Brown into a limo to rehab in Atlanta; she would like an additional $14,000 for two African carvings he never returned to her, or, failing that, the carvings. Johnson, too, would like to get paid. “We were always told by Mr Brown we would be taken care of,” he wrote in his claim. “Myself should get $2.5 million as he promised.” Maybe Brown did make that promise. But he never put it in writing, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had.

Times Archive, 1971: James Brown at the Albert Hall

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

Buddy Dallas met James Brown in 1984 at a political reception in Augusta, Georgia. The next day, the phone rang in Dallas’s office. It was Brown. “Mr Dallas,” he said, “I need you to represent me.” “But Mr Brown,” Dallas replied, “I don’t know anything about the entertainment business.” “That’s all right. I’ll teach you.”

Brown’s immediate problem was that he was broke. He hadn’t got into the US charts in seven years and was playing shows at a loss. He owed $20m in tax and the founder of the Sacramento chapter of his fan club was after him for child support. “Mr Dallas,” Brown said a week after they met, “I hate to ask you this, but I really need some money.” So the first thing Dallas did as Brown’s lawyer was give him $12,000.

The second thing he did was straighten out the child-support mess in Sacramento. “Mr Brown,” Dallas told him, “you’re going to have to be more careful.” “We’re not going to have to worry about that no more,” said Brown. He had had a vasectomy earlier that year, he told at least six people. Too late: one reason his estate is such a disaster is that he left so many heirs.

His first wife, Velma, bore three sons in the 1950s, of whom two survive; a backing singer had a fourth boy. Another singer had a daughter in 1965, and his second wife, Deidre, had two girls, in 1968 and 1972. The fan-club woman in Sacramento had her son in 1968. That’s seven children from five women. Brown’s appetite for women was insatiable, if not pathological.

“You’d have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women,” one of his confidants says. Which is apt – Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was four, and two years later he was sent to live in his Aunt Honey’s brothel in Augusta.

When Brown grew up and was touring 40 to 50 weeks a year, he had sex with a lot of women. Brown was not a man who made love. “He didn’t know about the soft,” a friend says. Often he’d let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink. “She ready?” he’d ask. Then he’d hop on, roll off. Straight to the point. So how many women? “There’d be times, literally, when one would be coming in the front door while another was going out the back,” says Dallas. Naturally, some got pregnant. In 1961 a groupie named Ruby Mae Shannon, from Houston, gave birth to a daughter, LaRhonda. In 1968 there was a pretty white 17-year-old named Lea Mernickle. She was waiting to buy a photograph after a show in Vancouver when Brown sent one of his men to fetch her. She flew home pregnant and had a baby girl, Cinnamon Nicole Mernickle.

In 1970 there was a woman named Christine Mitchell, whom he culled from the audience at a show in Miami. She gave birth to yet another daughter, Jeanette. That’s 10 children so far. At least four more are awaiting DNA results. The laws of probability suggest there are others.

Cinnamon – who calls herself Nicole – knew James Brown was her daddy. Not that it made her feel any better. Why would a man abandon his little girl? “I was believing he would come and rescue me.” He never did. The closest she got to meeting him was a conference call in the mid-1990s with Brown and a lawyer. “You ain’t my child,” said Brown. “Somebody lyin’ to you. If you is my daughter, I’d want to hug you and tell you I love you and meet your kids.” The conversation lasted all of three minutes.

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