More than a year after he passed, Mr. 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—put it in the backyard."

Except Mr. Brown is actually in the front yard. A minor point. But really, it's been that kind of year.

James Brown was not expecting to die when he did. He was 73 years old, with a wheezing chest and swollen feet, but the man wasn't ready to retire. He was going back on the road: New Year's Eve at B. B. King's place in Manhattan, then up to Ontario, west to British Columbia, down to Anaheim in February. Before the tour, in late December, he went to get a new set of bottom teeth screwed into his jaw, but a doctor heard that wheeze and sent him to the hospital. Thirty-six hours later, before dawn broke Christmas morning, his heart petered out.

Yet Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he'd drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his "personal and household effects"—his linens and china and such—to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear, too, that those were the only heirs he intended to favor. "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 sixty-acre estate in Beech Island, South Carolina, and his catalog of 800 or so songs, was to remain in a trust, which in turn was divided into two funds: one to educate his grandchildren (seven among 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 who attend school in South Carolina or Georgia. How much is that trust worth? Hard to say, because Mr. Brown's best assets are of a sort that can be marketed and managed in perpetuity as opposed to simply liquidated for cash. But the lowball estimate is $20 million, which, with proper promotion, could be multiplied many times over for many years to come. Elvis has been dead for three decades, after all, and he's still pulling eight figures annually.

In other words, Mr. Brown left a fortune to poor strangers.

Fifteen months later, none of those poor strangers have seen a nickel. Nor will they for months, and more likely 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 thirty-six hours after Mr. Brown died, and the first legal challenge was initiated less than two weeks after that. The lawsuits and lawyers rapidly multiplied—there are now more than thirty lawyers suing in three different courts—which has had the predictable result of resolving...precisely nothing.

For such a simple little will—all of five pages, and mostly boilerplate at that—there are a stupefying number of issues to resolve.

Mr. Brown's ostensible widow and the mother of James Brown II wants at least a third and perhaps half of his riches—though, as a matter of law, she is almost certainly not his widow nor, as a matter of human physiology, the mother of his biological child. Five of the six children named in the will want the trust dissolved and 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 and educational trusts to stand. At least two other daughters whom Mr. Brown never acknowledged also want a share of the pot, as well as eighteen years of back child support. Four more potential children—Jane and John Does I, II, III, and IV in the court records—might have similar claims. The three men Mr. 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 bullied them into quitting. 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. State investigators are working a criminal case on Cannon, too. The two special administrators Judge Early appointed to replace those three men, meanwhile, are being sued in federal court 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 J. Pope and Robert Buchanan, have in turn sued Bradley, Cannon, Dallas, entertainment lawyer Joel Katz, his firm (Greenberg Traurig), and Enterprise Bank in state court, alleging a years-long conspiracy to swindle millions from Mr. Brown. All of those people have lawyers, and many of them have more than one. Tomi Rae Hynie, the widow who's probably not technically a widow, has five. Her son has his representative, a guardian ad litem, and the guardian ad litem 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—the attorney general of South Carolina—and they used to have two until Judge Early tossed out the Georgia attorney general.