Songfacts®:

• Recorded by Emmylou Harris for her 2000 album Red Dirt Girl, "Tragedy" is her bittersweet musing on a love that never fully materialized. She depicts a relationship where mutual fear, suspicion, and bad timing caused two people to miss their chance.
• Harris hasn't publicly identified a specific real-life relationship as the inspiration for "Tragedy," but the song fits squarely within the deeply autobiographical spirit of the Red Dirt Girl album. Harris - who wrote or co-wrote all but one of the album's 12 tracks, only the second time in her career she had done so - described the record as rooted in themes of "lost companions and lonely journeys."
  
  "Tragedy," co-written with her longtime collaborator Rodney Crowell, reads as a reckoning with a love that was never fully claimed: a portrait of emotional unavailability and missed connection. Given that Harris had been through three marriages by the time the album was recorded, and that Crowell - himself no stranger to songs forged from personal heartbreak - co-authored the lyric, it seems likely the song draws from lived experience on both sides of the writing partnership, even if neither has named names.
• The song was produced by Malcolm Burn, recorded on March 20, 2000, at Closet Street Studio in New Orleans, Louisiana. Burn previously worked with Harris engineering and mixing Wrecking Ball (1995).
• Burn performed multiple roles on the track, playing 12-string guitar, bass, piano, Rhodes piano, and drum machine. Emmylou Harris played baritone electric guitar. The other musicians are:
  
  Buddy Miller: pedal steel guitar
  Daryl Johnson: bass guitar
  Ethan Johns: electric guitar
  Patti Scialfa: duet vocals
  Bruce Springsteen: harmony vocals
  
  The contributions of Patti Scialfa and Bruce Springsteen came about organically. "I wanted Patti Scialfa on that record," Harris told Uncut magazine." I wanted her vocal on one song and Patti and Bruce happened to be in town. He was sitting there in the living room and at the very end, on the little scat that Patti and I do, he puts about two bars of singing. So you could just say that it's actually a duet with Patti Scialfa, and we added that little cherry on top there with Bruce. Bruce, of course, gets all the credit while Patti Scialfa is an extraordinary singer and songwriter."
• Red Dirt Girl was a landmark album in Harris' career. It was her debut for Nonesuch Records and one of her most personal works, establishing her not just as an interpreter of great songs, but as a major songwriter in her own right. The album won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2001.