In 2006, Ags Connolly saw James Hand - the relatively obscure Texan honky tonker, likened to a ghost from country music's past - perform in London - Then later in Fort Worth, then London once more - While he would meet and witness 'Slim' again in the future, those first encounters proved critical to the path Ags took in music. "If I didn't know I was country, then that made up my mind," he later wrote in the song 'I Saw James Hand' (How About Now, 2014). James Hand was born in Waco, TX in 1952. He released the first of six albums in 1997, in a career where Willie Nelson called him "the real deal" and Kris Kristofferson described his songs as "soul music". When Hand died in June 2020 at the age of 67, and the dust from the rolling of the hearse finally settled, Ags Connolly knew he wanted to pay tribute in earnest to his hero. The English troubadour began by selecting the songs from Slim's back catalogue that spoke to him the most. Then he brought bass player Anna Robinson and drummer Robert Pokorny into Woodworm Studios in Oxfordshire, England to lay down a framework for the tracks. That allowed Ags to begin the process of recruiting key performers from James Hand's career to complete the instrumentation for what would become Your Pal Slim: Songs of James Hand.