The record for the largest attendance at a ticketed concert in the United States stood for nearly fifty years, when a 1977 Grateful Dead performance attracted 107,019 fans to Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey. That record was shattered on Saturday when George Strait—who previously held the record for the largest indoor concert attendance for the final night of his 2014 The Cowboy Rides Away Tour at AT&T Stadium in Arlington—blew past the milestone held for the past 47 years by Jerry Garcia and friends.

At Texas A&M’s Kyle Field in College Station, Strait bested both his indoor and the outdoor record by drawing 110,905 fans to what was billed as his only show in Texas this year.  The attendance record for the stadium itself—including at football games—also fell in the process. But when you’re talking about George Strait, the numbers tend to be high across the board. He’s had 44 number one hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, celebrated his 72nd birthday last month, and just released the first two singles from his 31st album, Cowboys and Dreamers, due out this fall. 

Is 2024 shaping up to be the Summer of Strait? As a partial answer to that question, here are 110,905 fans singing “Amarillo by Morning” with King George. 

It’s a rare feat for someone to break a concert attendance record ten years after their farewell show, but Strait never promised an end to performing, only to touring. The College Station show, officially dubbed The King at Kyle Field, was his sixth of 2024 and is part of a series of one-off performances he’s done every year since the cowboy rode away (surprisingly for an artist in semi-retirement, he even got in a handful of 2020 dates prior to the pandemic). Conroe native Parker McCollum celebrated his birthday by opening for Strait Saturday, putting him in excellent company. King George always has top-tier talent joining him on the bill in whatever stadium he pops into several times a year. This year, he’s mostly been accompanied by Chris Stapleton, a megastar who defers to Strait as the headliner, while fans have also been treated to sets from Little Big Town, Willie Nelson, and Carrie Underwood at concerts in recent years.

The performance at Kyle Field may not have been as valedictory as his Arlington show a decade earlier, where Jason Aldean, Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, and more joined him onstage at various points. But then, he’s not riding away anymore. In the next few months, he’s got dates (with Stapleton and Little Big Town) in Salt Lake City, Detroit, Chicago, and Las Vegas on the calendar. It’s more like he’s moseying on when the mood strikes him. But he’s also at a point in his career where every night he plays carries with it some meaning. He told the crowd on Saturday to expect to see him again. “Just invite me back,” he said, “I’ll come.” These days each performance is something of a victory lap, a hat tip from an artist with nothing to prove, giving a stadium’s worth of fans a few hours of familiar songs to sing along to. Semi-retirement looks good on King George. Long may he reign.