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       *The Associated Press checked in with the estate of James Brown one year after the entertainer's death on Christmas Day at age 73, and all is not well.  

       Tomi Rae Hynie, a former backup singer who claims to be Brown's fourth wife and the mother of his child, claims Brown wanted her to have his home in the western part of South Carolina, near the Georgia state line, but was locked out.      

       "Everybody says I'm being a drama queen and I'm a great actress," Hynie said, alternately sobbing and joking during a recent telephone interview with AP. "All I did was cry and fall to my knees and faint a couple of times. Isn't that how a wife is supposed to act at a funeral when she loses the man she loves?"

      Hynie has since been in court trying to win half of Brown's estate, which in October was reported by Forbes magazine to have earned an estimated $5 million in the prior year alone. But attorneys have said Brown's accounts do not have the money they expected. One former trustee of Brown's estate, David Cannon, has repaid $350,000 he was accused of misappropriating.

       "When I married James he said it wasn't because I was the prettiest girl in the room," Hynie said. "He said it's because I was a fighter. And I'm going to fight. ... I'm going to fight because every night, when me and that man were in bed together, all we did was talk about this day and what I was going to have to do and how if I wanted it I was going to really have to fight for it."

       Buddy Dallas, Brown's longtime attorney and adviser, has spent the year immersed in that fight. He met the entertainer in 1984 and was "with him through thick and thin from then until now."      

       "Mr. Brown needed what I was able to give him and that was someone he could trust," Dallas told the AP. "We laughed together, we cried together, we prayed together. And I was there for Mr. Brown's children as well."      

       But after their father died, Brown's adult children moved to oust Dallas and two other trustees. Dallas resigned in November but now claims the judge handling the disputes forced him out and he's trying retract his resignation.      

       "My only regret is that the children cannot accept the will of their father," Dallas said. "He left household and personal effects to his children. He left a trust fund to educate his grandchildren. And then everything else on the face of the earth that he owned he left to the needy and underprivileged children of Georgia and South Carolina for educational purposes. And he named his three friends (Brown's trustees) to carry out that purpose."

       As for Hynie, Dallas says she's not Brown's widow because she was still married to another man when she and Brown said their vows in 2001.