Lilith Fair
What was Lilith Fair?
What artists performed at Lilith Fair?
What impact did Lilith Fair have on women in music?
Why did Lilith Fair stop touring?
Billed as “a celebration of women in music,” Lilith Fair was a groundbreaking traveling North American music festival that exclusively featured women solo musicians and women-led bands. The festival, which toured during the summers of 1997–99, was cofounded and headlined by Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan and showcased such powerhouse musicians as Queen Latifah, the Indigo Girls, Sinéad O’Connor, and Tracy Chapman. Over its three years, Lilith Fair grossed $52 million, donated more than $10 million to charities supporting women’s health and safety, and drew more than 1.5 million attendees. The festival had a lasting impact on generations of women musicians and is credited with changing the music industry’s promotion of female artists for the better. Testifying to Lilith Fair’s significance, Bonnie Raitt, one of the festival’s featured artists, would later state, “It was the highlight of all my 50 years of playing.”
A women-centered music festival
McLachlan conceived of the idea for the festival after becoming frustrated with the male-dominated music industry, in which the conventional wisdom was that women artists could not be as financially successful or as big of a concert draw as male musicians. Concert promoters at the time told women musicians that people would not buy tickets to their shows if they toured together and urged female artists to instead tour with men. Many radio stations played very little music by women and typically would not play female artists back-to-back. But McLachlan believed there was an untapped audience for music made by women, and her hunch proved correct.
In 1996 she did a “test run” of several shows featuring herself and a few other female performers, including Paula Cole, Suzanne Vega, Patti Smith, and Lisa Loeb. In 2017 Vega recalled to Rolling Stone, “I was a little surprised when [McLachlan] asked, at first, as it’s true that you almost never had two women on the bill at that point in time, and certainly not three.”
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The first Lilith Fair (1997)
In 1997 McLachlan, her manager Marty Diamond, and music executives Terry McBride and Dan Fraser organized a full-fledged festival. It was named for Lilith, a demonic figure of Jewish folklore who is said to have been Adam’s first wife (before Eve). According to tradition, Lilith left the Garden of Eden after refusing to be subservient to Adam. Many years later McLachlan told Vanity Fair that she also chose “fair” because “the word fair, to me, is about equality and inclusivity.”
Although many in the music industry predicted Lilith Fair would lose money, in the festival’s inaugural year it was the top-grossing festival tour in the United States, proving to many that women musicians were as marketable as their male counterparts. The inaugural Lilith Fair played 37 North American dates, many of them sold-out shows, with 69 women-fronted acts. Performing artists included Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Fiona Apple, Cole, Emmylou Harris, the Cardigans, Chapman, Natalie Merchant, Loeb, Pat Benatar, and India.Arie.
Each stop on the tour had three stages of music, one of which was devoted to local artists who had been accepted into the lineup by submitting their music to the organizers. The festival’s village area featured booths that provided information on such organizations as the Breast Cancer Fund, LIFEbeat (a charity dedicated to AIDS research and awareness), the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, Planned Parenthood, and local domestic violence shelters. One dollar of each ticket sold was donated by the festival organizers to local nonprofits throughout Canada and the United States.
1998 and 1999 Lilith Fair tours
The inaugural festival was criticized for showcasing mainly white folk, soft rock, and pop artists, although McLachlan said many other performers were invited who turned down the gig. Among those who reportedly said no were British rocker PJ Harvey, alternative rock group Garbage (led by Shirley Manson), and riot grrrl band Sleater-Kinney. In 2017 McLachlan told Rolling Stone, “I think [the rejections were] partly because they didn’t know who we were, they didn’t know what we were capable of. Nor did we, quite frankly.”
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But the success of the 1997 tour made it easier to attract a wider diversity of musicians and genres and also led organizers to expand the tour to 57 shows featuring more than 100 acts in 1998. The second year’s iteration included many previous participants, as well as new artists representing rap, soul, rhythm and blues, and country, including O’Connor, Erykah Badu, Raitt, Missy Elliott, Vega, Liz Phair, Lauryn Hill, Luscious Jackson, Lucinda Williams, Idina Menzel, Neko Case, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Martina McBride.
In 1999 Lilith Fair played 40 shows with more than 120 acts. Performers included Mýa, the Pretenders, Aimee Mann, the Chicks (then known as the Dixie Chicks), Queen Latifah, the Indigo Girls, Tegan and Sara, Christina Aguilera, Susan Tedeschi, Nelly Furtado, Monica, and Sandra Bernhard.
Reception among the ’90s music scene
Lilith Fair arose in a decade that produced many successful female recording artists (especially singer-songwriters), female-fronted bands such as Garbage and Hole (the latter led by Courtney Love), the groundbreaking punk riot grrrl movement, and popular girl groups such as the Spice Girls. But the 1990s also saw a preponderance of male-dominated traveling music festivals such as Lollapalooza, Ozzfest, and the notorious Woodstock ’99 that devolved into rioting and reports of rape and sexual assault. Considering this festival milieu, the unabashedly feminist Lilith Fair was bound to receive some pushback.
For example, a conservative religious newspaper owned by televangelist Jerry Falwell objected to the festival’s name and mission. In addition, at a Texas tour stop anti-abortion protesters unsuccessfully tried to force organizers to exclude Planned Parenthood from the fair’s village. During the 1998 tour’s stop in Atlanta, bomb threats were called in to the venue, but the show went on.
Because of its focus on women musicians, the festival was the target of sexism and ridicule in the mainstream media and in satiric humor publications such as The Onion, which ran an article in 1998 about the “largest-ever synchronized ovulation” achieved by “more than 20,000 Lilith Fair performers and attendees.” Some critics and people in the music industry dubbed it “Chick-apalooza” or “Lesbopalooza.” The sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live poked fun at the fair’s earnest folkie vibe in a bit that featured McLachlan and cast member Ana Gasteyer performing a Thanksgiving protest song called “Basted in Blood.”
Despite the political pressure and negative press, both the musicians and the festival attendees gave Lilith Fair positive reviews. In interviews, many performers noted the supportive, collaborative atmosphere, in which musicians who were starting out in their careers learned from stars at the height of their popularity. Indeed, the festival is credited with helping launch the careers of Dido, Aguilera, Furtado, and Tegan and Sara, among others. In 2019 Crow told Vanity Fair that Lilith Fair “defied that notion that women are constantly competing.”
Artists were also welcome to bring their spouses and children on tour with them, and downtime between shows was filled with spontaneous jam sessions and pickup basketball games. Many shows ended with the main stage acts performing several songs together. Attendees praised the festival’s focus on a safe, harassment-free atmosphere.
Legacy
Following the 1999 tour, a combination of factors led to a 10-year hiatus for the festival. A Lilith Fair revival toured in 2010, with performers including Brandi Carlile, Mary J. Blige, Miranda Lambert, Cat Power, the Bangles, Heart, Grace Potter, Jennifer Nettles, Badu, Crow, and Janelle Monáe. Originally scheduled to play in more than 30 cities across the United States and Canada, with plans to also tour Europe, some of the festival’s shows were canceled because of poor ticket sales. Like other music tours that year, Lilith Fair was the victim of aftereffects of the 2008 recession.
With her proceeds from Lilith Fair, McLachlan founded (with the Wolverton Foundation) the Sarah McLachlan School of Music in Vancouver in 2011. The school provides free after-school music education programs for children and youth who do not have access to traditional music education.
In 2025 the documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery was released. It explored the tour’s impact on female musicians, including later generations such as singers Carlile (who attended the festival in the ’90s) and Olivia Rodrigo. Another attendee of the original tour, actor Dan Levy, was one of the documentary’s producers. In the film, McLachlan summed up the festival’s legacy: “It was a massive success, and it changed people’s lives.”