Awful, boring cover of Smiths tracks (6)
I believe the answer is:
spoors
'tracks' is the definition.
(spoor is a kind of track)
'awful boring cover of smiths' is the wordplay.
'awful' becomes 'poor' (I can't justify this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'boring' indicates putting letters inside (some letters must 'bore' a hole into other letters).
'cover of' says to hollow out the word (remove centre letters) (only the letters which cover the word).
'smiths' with its middle taken out is 'ss'.
'poor' placed inside 'ss' is 'SPOORS'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for spoors that I've seen before include "Hunters follow them when pursuing game" , "What the hunter follows in pursuing game" .)