Either Jim Morrison of The Doors or Melanie Safka, who performed at Woodstock 1969.

Let's set the scene. It's January 1969, and The Doors are at the peak of their popularity. They've just released "Touch Me" and "Wild Child" as singles, and the pair of these (on a single 45) were at No. 8 on the Billboard 100 charts. They've just appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour TV show, seen by more than 27 million people -- and now they're about to play Madison Square Garden, possibly their biggest concert to date.

More than 20,000 screaming New Yorkers have packed The Garden, and as the show starts at 9:30 p.m., Jan. 24, 1969, cameras are going off like crazy. The Doors open with "Touch Me" and move on to "The Soft Parade." More songs come: "Tell all the People," "Love Me Two Times," "Who Scared You" and so on.

Halfway through the concert, The Doors launch into "Light My Fire," and the crowd goes berzerk as the first notes sound. As the song ends, Morrison starts talking to the crowd.

"Does anyone have a cigarette?" he cries out over the PA system. "Ah, yeah, does anybody have anything or a Marlboro?"

Morrison gets his cigarette, then says over the PA system, "I need a match."

The flames of thousands of matches and lighters blossom over the crowd.

Now, I don't know if these quotes are exactly right, but they're in the spirit of that night. Morrison asked for a light, and he got thousands of them. At subsequent concerts, drummer John Densmore said people would hold up their lighters as a way of saying they wanted the band to play "Light My Fire."

Now, this claim is somewhat shaky, so let's go on to the one that (if The Doors don't have first claim) definitively started the trend.

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It was pouring rain in Bethel, New York on Friday, Aug. 15, 1969. A thunderstorm had moved into the area, drenching 400,000 people at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

As folk musician Melanie Safka took the stage just shy of 11 p.m. that night, the stage announcer instructed the audience to light candles "to keep away the rain." The candles had just been handed out to the crowd in a mass distribution. The drizzling rain dampened the candles, and attendees whose candles were extinguished (or didn't receive a candle) raised their cigarette lighters in support. The net effect was astonishing from the stage, Safka recalled.

The experience inspired her to write a song: "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)". That song, released in 1970, reached No. 6 on the Billboard 100 chart, and Safka's fans commemorated the event by holding lighters up at her concerts. Today, Safka's LinkedIn page declares, "My appearance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival prompted the now-common phenomenom of signaling an artist for an encore by holding-up some form of light...(at Woodstock it was candles; which then emerged into cigarette-lighters, and now onto cellular phones! ~It inspired my writing of "Lay Down, Candles In The Rain)!"