Twenty feet of golden-locked, all-American-male country singer crossed the stage of the FedExForum Saturday night as Alan Jackson’s “Good Time Tour” pulled into town with supporting acts Trace Adkins and James Otto.

The casual country fan could be forgiven for confusing the three performers. Each stands over 6 feet 5 inches tall, has long blond hair, and sports some form of facial hair. But if the artists’ looked the same, their sounds were remarkably diverse within the confines of the contemporary country music scene.

Of the three, Jackson, soon to turn 50 though looking fit and young in close-ups on the giant video screens behind him, has emerged as a leader of the old line.

Especially coming after the whiz-bang performances of the two opening performers, his set was startling in its simplicity, with just Jackson — backed by his eight-piece band, the Strayhorns — standing at a mic for two hours banging out familiar favorites to a steady country beat.

As Jackson told the crowd of 8,000: “We’re pretty laid back up here. We’re pickers and singers, and that’s pretty much all we do.”

In typical Jackson style, that was an understatement as the band squeezed an amazing 33 songs, most of them hits, into their set.

As pure a honky-tonker as you’re likely to find these days, Jackson doesn’t dress up songs with hip-hop beats and horns to sell them to a modern audience. Instead the top-notch band favored lean, efficient arrangements on material as diverse as the opening manifesto “Gone Country,” the Jim Ed Brown barroom ode “Pop A Top,” and the tender ballad “Wanted.” Even the rockers, like a Cajun-esque cover of “Summertime Blues,” leaned more toward something Hank Williams Sr. might do than the Eddie Cochran original.

The unadorned approach emphasized the common poetry of Jackson’s “songs about sinners and drinkers, songs of loss and love.” Numbers like the recent single “Small Town Southern Man” and older gems like “Little Man” continue the long country tradition of celebrating the everyday.

More lush and sophisticated, Jackson’s take on “Like Red on a Rose,” from his recent Allison Krauss-produced album of the same name, stuck out as a stylistic sore thumb. The torch song was a departure for Jackson, the sort of stuff Michael Bublé or Krauss herself might tackle. But Jackson, a vastly underrated singer whose unaffected style belies his chops, sold it despite the shift in tone from his regular material.

In a desire to squeeze in as many hits as possible (his catalog includes more than 50 Top 20 songs) Jackson gave short shrift to some, keeping selections like “When Somebody Loves You” and “Right On the Money” down to a frustratingly brief verse and chorus that clocked in at around two minutes. Fortunately, Jackson barely gave anyone time to care as he wordlessly launched into the next tune.

While Jackson’s performance emphasized the traditional, his two opening performers, in different ways, illustrated the ways in which country has crossed over to reach more mainstream pop music fans.

Adkins has become perhaps Nashville’s most canny updater of the country sound. His biggest hits, like “I Got My Game On” and “Swing,” are up-tempo rockers with humorous lyrics, big catchy choruses, and a sensibility that seems to borrow heavily from hip-hop and professional sports. This hit-making combination reached its zenith in Adkins’ performance of “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” a song about women’s hind quarters which the singer said answered the age-old question: How did Eve get Adam to eat that apple? “She worked that badonkadonk,” he told the audience.

For most of his hour-long performance, Adkins prowled the stage like a lion, sans guitar, punctuating, as on “Chrome,” some of his more sexually suggestive (though still PG-rated) lyrics with a pelvis thrust.

But Adkins did show a more sensitive and musically ambitious side. Modulating his performance, he elicited tears from the audience for his fallen-soldier ballad “Arlington.” And “Muddy Water,” the gospel-flavored first single from his upcoming album, allowed him to open up his voice in a new way, with support from Memphis’ own Kevin Davidson and the Voices.

First up on the bill, James Otto was making his second FedExForum appearance in five months. (He opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr., on their “Rowdy Friends” tour in June). Pushing a mixture of country rock rhythms and R&B-style emotive singing that he calls “country soul,” Otto’s sound more closely resembled early ’90s roots rockers like Hootie & the Blowfish and Edwin McCain than anything that could rightly be called country. Otto himself forsook the traditional cowboy hat his tourmates wore in favor of a straw fedora.

Regardless of classification, the hooks on numbers like “These Are the Good Ole Days,” and the No. 1 hit “Just Got Started Lovin’ You,” were ingratiating. And the affecting ballad “For You” packed an unexpected emotional wallop, when, after singing it, Otto brought an audience member out on stage to propose to his girlfriend.

She said yes.