Alan Jackson played the final concert of his career to 50,000 fans at Nissan Stadium

Alan Jackson walked out at Nissan Stadium a little after 9:35 on Saturday night, an hour late because of a storm and visibly stiff in the legs. Then he picked up his guitar for "Gone Country," and the voice answered the only question that mattered. The baritone was still there, smoky and sure, the strumming kept light, and the 50,000 people who waited out the weather got the goodbye they came for. "It's overwhelming," he told them, before promising not to dwell on "that last show stuff." Then, grinning: "I'm not dead!"

He isn't. He's just done with the road. "Last Call: One More for the Road - The Finale" was the last full-length concert of a touring career that started in the 1980s and broke wide open in the '90s country wave, that run of hat acts and traditionalists who pulled the genre back toward fiddle and steel while the radio was busy chasing pop. Jackson, out of Newnan, Georgia, sold north of 60 million records without once pretending to be something he wasn't. Working-man songs about drinking, fishing, marrying your high school sweetheart and staying put. He leans on plainspokenness the way other singers lean on a smoke machine.

The weight under the party is real. Jackson is 67, and five years ago he told fans he has Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a degenerative nerve condition that affects his balance and has made performing harder year over year. A dollar from every ticket on Saturday went to the CMT Research Foundation, which funds the search for a cure.

The night ran in two movements. The first two hours belonged to the singers he raised on his records. Carrie Underwood took "Everything I Love" and admitted Jackson was the first concert she ever attended, in 1994 at the Tulsa State Fair. Thomas Rhett, now a girl-dad four times over, sang "Small Town Southern Man," a song he is more or less living. Miranda Lambert went back to Texas with "Dallas." Lainey Wilson loosened the place up with "Tall, Tall Trees." Luke Combs said it was almost impossible to pick a favorite, then picked "Hard Hat and a Hammer." Eric Church waved off the band entirely and did "Someday" with nothing but his voice and an acoustic. Luke Bryan, Riley Green, Cody Johnson, Little Big Town, Jake Owen, Jon Pardi and Lee Ann Womack rounded out the bill, along with Jackson's own kin, the Wrights.

Then the man himself, ninety minutes deep into the catalog. "I Don't Even Know Your Name," "Livin' on Love," a swing through Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues," the haunted "Midnight in Montgomery," each with its old video rolling on the screen behind him. He pulled up a stool and told stories. "I'd Love You All Over Again," written for Denise on their tenth anniversary. "Drive (For Daddy Gene)," written after his father died. The fact that the actual radio from "Chasin' That Neon Rainbow" now sits in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

An hour into his own set he said he needed a hand with the next one, and George Strait walked out. They did "Designated Drinker" and then "Murder on Music Row," which is the song to keep in your head if you want the whole night to make sense. Strait and Jackson cut that one in 1999 as a quiet act of protest, a country record mourning the day country music sold its traditional soul. Twenty-seven years on, the genre is the biggest it has ever been, and the two men who sang the eulogy were standing center stage in a sold-out NFL stadium. Make of that what you will.

From there he turned loose the giants, and played them with more snap than a 67-year-old with bad balance has any business summoning: "Little Bitty," "Country Boy," "Good Time," and "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," his hymn for Sept. 11. "Don't Rock the Jukebox." "Remember When." "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere," still carrying the late Jimmy Buffett's voice on the recording. Fireworks went up over "Chattahoochee."

This is the end of the touring, not the music. Two days before the finale Jackson released a country cover of Orleans' "Still the One" for Denise, his wife of 50 years and the high school cheerleader he fell for on sight. The full concert was filmed for an NBC special, "Alan Jackson: The Last Show," due later this year with a Peacock stream the day after. For the people who stood through the storm, though, the live one is the take that counts. There won't be another.