Lilith Fair is not a person but a famous touring music festival built around women in music, founded in the late 1990s by Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan and her team.

Quick Scoop: Who (or what) is Lilith Fair?

  • Lilith Fair was a travelling summer music festival that ran from 1997–1999, with a short-lived revival in 2010.
  • It featured only female solo artists and female‑fronted bands, making it a landmark event for women in popular music.
  • The festival was cofounded by Sarah McLachlan along with Dan Fraser, Terry McBride, and Marty Diamond.
  • The name comes from Lilith in Jewish lore, often portrayed as Adam’s first wife who refused to be subservient, which fit the festival’s independent, feminist-leaning spirit.

Why it mattered

  • In the mid‑90s, promoters and radio programmers often avoided putting two women back‑to‑back on bills or playlists; McLachlan pushed back by organizing tours with other women artists, which evolved into Lilith Fair.
  • In its first year, Lilith Fair was the top‑grossing touring festival of 1997, earning about 16 million dollars and ultimately bringing in around 60 million over its three‑year run.
  • It proved to skeptical executives that women-led acts could sell tickets and headline large venues on their own.

Who played Lilith Fair?

Across its runs, Lilith Fair hosted many well‑known artists, for example:

  • Sarah McLachlan
  • Sheryl Crow
  • Jewel
  • Tracy Chapman
  • Fiona Apple
  • Indigo Girls
  • Erykah Badu
  • SinĂŠad O’Connor
  • Emmylou Harris
  • Natalie Merchant

These lineups mixed folk, pop, rock, R&B, and alternative, and later years put more emphasis on genre and racial diversity after early criticism that the bill skewed too white and folk‑oriented.

Legacy and recent buzz

  • Lilith Fair is often remembered as a turning point for women’s visibility in mainstream rock and pop festivals, inspiring later women‑centric or equity‑focused lineups.
  • There was an attempted revival in 2010, though it did not reach the original’s commercial success.
  • The festival’s legacy is being revisited in newer commentary and a 2025 documentary, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery , which looks back at its impact and how it addressed issues like diversity and representation.

If you’ve seen people online asking “who is Lilith Fair,” they’re usually just confusing the festival’s name with a person, or using it as shorthand for a very ’90s, women‑led alt‑music vibe.

TL;DR: Lilith Fair is a groundbreaking women-focused music festival created by Sarah McLachlan in the late ’90s, not an individual artist.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.