25 Years Later, Lilith Fair Recalls How One Woman's Radical Idea Changed Music

It was July 5th, 1997: opening night of the groundbreaking all-female music festival Lilith Fair.

The lineup included a who’s who of the female alternative musicians of the moment: Sheryl Crow, Jewel, The Indigo Girls, Lisa Loeb, Fiona Apple, Shawn Colvin, Tracy Chapman, Natalie Merchant and more.

Lilith Fair was the culmination of a year-long effort by its founder, a Canadian singer-songwriter. Sarah McLachlan had been told by music and concert industry executives that putting more than one woman back-to-back on a line-up or radio playlist would not sell.

“Like I came in and did an interview and they said, ‘Well, we’d like to add that song, but we can’t add you this week because we had a Tori Amos, or because we added Tracy Chapman, or because we added Sinéad O’Connor,'” she recalls. “And it was extremely frustrating. So the beginning of this was just out of a desire to come together as a community. And it became like this — we’re going to break down some barriers boys prove otherwise.”

So McLachlan began raising funds and collaborating with artists to take them on stage before founding Lilith in the summer of 1997.

In its first summer, Lilith overtook the then-dwindling Lollapolooza festival in both viewership and ticket sales. It returned for two more summers and became the highest-grossing music festival of the late 1990s, raking in $60 million in ticket sales during its three-year run.

The eclectic group of female artists included folk, rock, country and pop musicians and sold out almost every single show in its first year. But as Lilith’s popularity grew, critics vilified the festival as “mother music” and proclaimed its mostly white artist roster.

Exactly 25 years later, musicians who attended Lilith Fair and journalists who covered it spoke about the importance of the festival in interviews with NPR.

Jessica Hopper, who wrote an oral history of Lilith Fair, says Lilith’s lessons are still relevant today.

“Safe Space is something we still want to encourage and hold up as an ideal, and it’s like waiting – it’s been done three summers in a row with music’s biggest names,” she explains. “It has shown people models of possibility.”

Criticism was quick, but so were changes

Perhaps inevitably, Lilith became the target of comedians and cultural critics looking to score at the expense of female musical agency. It was just months after Lilith’s first-ever show for Saturday Night Live to introduce a recurring character who poked fun at the overly serious stereotype of a Lilith artist, played by Ana Gasteyer, who babbled on about her folksy approach.

In 1998 the organizers of Lilith had more money at their disposal and could look back on the considerable success of the previous summer. The festival expanded from 37 shows to 57 shows and expanded its lineup to include more than 100 artists across three stages. Festival programmers questioned the perception of Lilith Fair as a mostly white group of folk and alternative artists at a time when R&B, rap and hip-hop were rising in popularity.

Ahead of his sophomore year, McLachlan worked with organizers to intentionally add more color artists to the ticket: Erykah Badu and Queen Latifah performed on the main stage for Lilith’s sophomore year, along with the up-and-coming Missy Elliott, who made her live debut on the Lilith Fair in a giant vinyl garbage bag-inspired suit.

“The whole second year I think is really meaningful because they were artists who changed things in worlds other than the world [McLachlan] busy,” says NPR music critic Ann Powers, who attended all three summers of Lilith Fair. “And through With a 2022 lens, we could say, ‘Oh, I wish there was more variety’… but they have to be given credit.”