After nine years of playing in James Brown's backup band and witnessing up close how he took a stage by storm, Daryl Brown was not surprised when his famous father died on Christmas.

A man known to the world by such sobriquets as "Mr. Dynamite" and "The Godfather of Soul" couldn't take his final bow on just any ordinary day.

"That's a serious stage exit," the Soul Generals' guitarist said with a hearty laugh. "Between you and Jesus. The brother was bad. If James Brown had anything to do with it, you were going to remember when he passed."

His sister Venisha Brown agreed.

"James Brown always got to do something with a bang to it," she said.

Nor have the 12 months since their father's death from pneumonia-related heart failure at age 73 been quiet. There are the unsettled legal disputes over his estate, paternity suits from women who proved through DNA that they are daughters born out of wedlock to Mr. Brown and allegations that the singer's named heirs are going against his last wishes to get their hands on what's left of his financial empire.

And there is the mourning. The sense of loss that is always just a cherished memory away.

"Just the point of having that special person to be able to sit down and have a friendly chat with, like on who you're picking in a fight," said Larry Brown, the second oldest of six children Mr. Brown named in his will. "I have not this year been able to do that with my father, and that changed me a lot. Something as basic as that. Nothing big, just something basic."

They are not surprised by what has happened in the past year. Their father was no stranger to controversy when he was alive, so, they said, it wasn't a shock to them that it followed him in death.

"There were negatives even when he was alive. Y'all didn't write great stories about him when he was alive," daughter Deanna Brown Thomas said with a chuckle, drawing laughs from others in a cramped studio at a local radio station, where she's an on-air personality. "I mean, come on now. It wasn't always a peaches and cream story, was it? You learn to live with it, not dwell on it."

In fact, Larry Brown said, his father prepared them for what could happen after his death. He told them there would be people who would say things that aren't true and try to split the family apart.

That's not going to happen, he said.

"A person that would say something like (it's about the money) can't be your friend because first they must realize that we lost our father, one of the most important links of our family," Larry Brown said. "All the money in the world can't bring him back. If that was the case, I would buy my father back. It ain't about the money; it's about what he wanted.

"Like I said, we were taught at a young age what to expect. So, no, that doesn't bother us at all. We just pull up our boot strings and keep fighting."

The fight, they say, is about making sure the music and humanitarian legacy he established over more than 50 years in entertainment is not forgotten. That means doing whatever it takes to turn his Beech Island home into a museum, where his body, in a temporary crypt at Mrs. Thomas' nearby ranch, can finally be laid to rest.

"He often talked about his home being a museum, so we're working to attain those goals," Mrs. Thomas said. "Anybody as big as James Brown passes away, there's going to be a lot of things that are going to have to be straightened out."

One of those things sometimes is money, Daryl Brown said.

"Listen, man, it takes money to keep a legacy going." he said. "How you going to keep it going if you ain't got no money? I mean, come on. That don't even make no sense. I would say it was the opposite. It's not the children that's after no money. Hell, we never had none in the beginning. It was all his anyway.

"We're just trying to keep (his legacy going), and it takes money to do that. Who better to do it than his children? What better person's able to do his wishes but his children?"

REFLECTING ON THE TIME they spent with their father helps get them through these trying times. Venisha Brown remembered one moment that she can now laugh about, but wasn't so humorous when it happened.

She was about 7 and was playing with Deanna in a camper at their father's house, which was then on Walton Way.

"Me and Deanna, we get in one of the campers, and I'm driving it, I think I'm driving it, and I pulled the camper in reverse and the camper started rolling backwards," she recalled, a big smile lighting up her face. "And I jumped out the camper, and I leave Deanna in the camper."

It hit about four of her father's cars, but, luckily for her, baby sister was OK.

"I was so scared that he was about to beat the brakes off me," Ms. Brown said. "All he was worried about was, 'You left the baby in the car.' He yelled at me; he didn't whip me. He gave me some money and sent me on the next plane back to California to my mother. ... And it hurt my feelings because I knew my daddy was mad. I knew he was mad at me, but he called me the next day and told me he loved me."

Being the child of such a famous man hasn't been easy, she said, particularly when you look so much like him. She struggled to maintain her own identity, recalling how people would often gasp when they were together at how much she and her father resembled each other. On countless occasions, people would stare and whisper to friends when she went out in public.

"I might be at Wal-Mart, and I walk by and somebody go, 'That's James Brown's daughter,' " Ms. Brown said. "Even if they don't know my name, I'm James Brown's daughter. It took a long time until I adjusted, but it doesn't bother me. Now it's an honor, you know, that I am James Brown's daughter, though he is just Daddy to me.

"I see other people's faces light up when they see me because some people maybe never got a chance to meet my father. It's like, 'I'm meeting his daughter,' and for them to smile and stuff like that, it makes me feel good."

But if it was hard being the son or daughter of James Brown, it was even tougher being the man himself, someone who couldn't escape his celebrity. Larry Brown recalled one particularly poignant moment.

He had been at his father's house and had taken a swim in the pool. Afterward, he put on a jogging suit and was getting ready to head home when his father said something he hasn't forgotten.

"He said, 'Man, I sho'nuf would like to throw on a jogging suit and just go out and chill out and look at a movie, but guess what, I can't do that,' " Mr. Brown recalled. "I said, here goes a man who has done almost every major thing in the world you can name musically, and he can't go out and see a movie with a jogging suit on without being James Brown. ... This is a man who could have bought movie theaters, but he couldn't go out there and sit in the public place and just enjoy a movie. That's why I said it was kind of sad, but it's a memory that will stay in my head."

TOWARD THE END, SAID SON DARYL, his father, who spent more than a third of each year on the road playing gigs, had tired of the grind. He believes his father was ready for what happened Christmas Day.

"Like I tell everybody, my father just got tired of being James Brown," Daryl Brown said. "He really wanted to be James Joseph Brown, where he could just let his hair down, he didn't have to get up and get his hair done or he didn't have to get up and dress a certain way. Trying to live up to other people's images of how you should be.

"When people keep saying they're tired, they're tired, man. And they're ready to give up that will. Once you give that up, you can be in great health, and you can leave tomorrow. He just got tired of being James Brown."

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was at the singer's annual Christmas toy giveaway in Augusta on Thursday to stand in for the man he often referred to as his "daddy," also believes his mentor knew his days on Earth were nearing an end.

"I think for the last year and a half, he was winding down," the civil rights activist said. "I think that he started to come to terms, for the first time in his life, with mortality. There was a lot of pressure on him because the whole world expected him to always be Superman. And it was the first time that I'd ever heard him say things like, 'I'm an old man' or 'I'm tired.' I think he had just got weary."

The Rev. Sharpton said he believes Mr. Brown is at peace with his place in history, despite all the fuss going on now.

"There is not an artist in the history of the world that came from so low and went so high and meant so much, and I think that he can be at peace with that," he said. "And no matter what they do in any courtroom, no matter what decision comes down, they can't undo that."

Reach Mike Wynn at (706) 823-3218 or mike.wynn@augustachronicle.com.