1972 · Behind the Songs
The third single from Paul Simon’s 1972 solo debut sent a fisherman’s son down the road with two Andean flutes for company — a quiet road song that never needed to be a hit.
Some of Paul Simon’s best songs are journeys — not just in the lyrical sense, but in the way the music itself seems to pack a bag and leave town. "Duncan," released as a single in July 1972, is one of his loveliest road songs, a ballad in E minor about Lincoln Duncan, a fisherman’s son from Canada’s Maritime Provinces heading south to New England with nothing but a guitar and his restlessness. It was the third and final single from Simon’s self-titled 1972 solo album, and though it never became a hit on the scale of its predecessors, it has endured as a fan favorite — the sound of an artist learning, in real time, how wide the world was.
The album arrived at a hinge moment. Simon & Garfunkel, the duo that had defined the 1960s folk-rock era, had gone their separate ways, and Paul Simon was starting over as a solo artist with something to prove — not least to himself. The self-titled record was a deliberate widening of his musical map, drawing on rhythms and textures from far beyond the folk clubs where he had started. "Duncan" was its quietest adventure, a folk ballad that looked north for its story and south — to the Andes — for its sound.
The lyric is pure Simon storytelling — specific, unsentimental, and quietly devastating. Lincoln Duncan leaves home with his father’s blessing and his mother’s worry, thumbing his way toward a new life, and along the way he loses his innocence in the time-honored folk-song manner. Simon never judges his hero; he simply walks beside him, observing with the novelist’s eye that would become his trademark. The Maritime Provinces setting gives the song its salt air — you can almost smell the docks — while the journey south gives it its ache: every verse carries Duncan a little farther from the boy he was.
An Andean heart
The recording’s masterstroke is its Andean heart. The instrumental interludes are played on two flutes by Los Incas, the South American group Simon had first brought to global attention on Simon & Garfunkel’s "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)." Their breathy, circling flute lines give "Duncan" its "Pied Piper mystique" — Cash Box’s exact phrase in its contemporary review — a sound at once ancient and weightless, as if the song keeps remembering a continent its hero has never seen. Simon himself played acoustic guitar and sang, arranged the track and co-produced it with Roy Halee, his longtime studio partner; Los Incas added charango and percussion alongside the flutes.
A modest chart journey
Columbia released "Duncan" as a single in July 1972 with "Run That Body Down" on the B-side, and it performed respectably if modestly: number fifty-two on the Billboard Pop Singles chart, number thirty on the Easy Listening chart, and number thirty-nine on Canada’s RPM chart. Record World, reviewing it, called the single "slightly more subdued" than its predecessors — which was precisely the point. This was not a song chasing the charts; it was a song chasing a feeling, and the feeling was wanderlust with a lump in its throat.
What to listen for
What to listen for: the dialogue between Simon’s guitar and the Andean flutes. His acoustic playing is all forward motion — steady, unshowy fingerpicking that mimics a young man’s walking pace — while the flutes float above it like weather, unconcerned with destination. In the verses, Simon’s voice is plain and young-sounding, almost conversational; he lets the story do the emotional work. Then the flute interlude arrives and the song seems to lift off the ground, the "Pied Piper" bridge carrying Duncan — and the listener — somewhere beyond the map.
Listen, too, for how the song ends — not with a flourish but with a kind of benediction. The flutes have the last word, circling back to the melody as if to say the journey continues past the fade. It is one of Simon’s most humane endings: no moral, no punchline, just a young man on the road and the vast, indifferent, beautiful world around him. The E-minor tonality keeps everything a shade darker than a major-key folk song would allow, and that darkness is the song’s honesty — leaving home, it insists, should cost you something.
The road not taken
"Duncan" never left Simon’s orbit. He recorded it live with the Andean group Urubamba for his 1974 concert album Paul Simon in Concert: Live Rhymin’, and the song became a semi-regular presence on the Deep Tracks satellite radio channel, where connoisseurs keep its flame. Its most touching tribute came from a fan: in Toronto in 2011, singer-songwriter Rayna Ford told the story of a woman who approached her after a show to talk about what "Duncan" had meant to her — proof that a song about one fictional young man’s journey had become, for some listeners, the soundtrack of their own.
The track was recorded in 1971, as Simon was assembling the album that would announce his solo identity, and it shows an artist already thinking like a producer. The decision to build the arrangement around Andean flutes rather than a conventional rock rhythm section was a quiet manifesto: Simon would follow his ear wherever it led, even if it led to the mountains of Peru by way of a song about the Maritimes. Halee, the engineer who had shaped the crystalline sound of Simon & Garfunkel’s greatest records, captured the flutes with an airy closeness that makes them feel like they are playing inside your head.
More than fifty years later, "Duncan" remains the road not taken in Simon’s catalog — the hit that wasn’t, the single that chose poetry over commerce. For those who know it, though, it is indispensable: a reminder that the best travel songs are never really about the destination, and that sometimes the most exotic instrument in pop is simply a wooden flute, played by friends, carrying a boy from the Maritimes a little farther down the road.