Back At The Chicken Shack was recorded in 1960 with tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, guitarist Kenny Burrell, and drummer Donald Bailey, at the same session that produced 1961’s Midnight Special. It wasn’t released until 1963, though, after he’d left Blue Note for Verve. Somehow or other, it’s become his best-known record, and it does make an excellent entry point into his catalog. The cover photo’s evocation of rural black life (Smith sitting by a chicken coop, petting a hound) may be ersatz — the organist was an urbane guy from Philadelphia — but the music is undeniable. Whether Smith is pumping out slow bass chords beneath Turrentine, as on the ballad “When I Grow Too Old To Dream,” or taking fleet solos of his own, he never sets a finger wrong, and Bailey is a perfect accompanist, his groove light and dancing where a less subtle player would whomp and thud.