The concert was organized quickly; performers said they had been invited within the last few weeks. It was part of a series that began in June with a jazz event and will continue with a classical music program in the fall. Mr. Paisley, whose new album “American Saturday Night” is currently No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart, said the lineup reflected the “different worlds” of country.

“They grabbed the contemporary popular chart,” he said, referring to himself. “They grabbed the artistic bluegrass side,” he continued, referring to Ms. Krauss. “And then they grabbed the legend side”: Mr. Pride, country’s most successful African-American performer, has had more than three dozen No. 1 country singles since the mid-1960s.

Mr. Paisley performed the title song of “American Saturday Night,” about the United States as a melting pot, and “Welcome to the Future,” which has a verse about race relations that starts with the recollection of a burning cross and concludes, “From a woman on a bus to a man with a dream/Hey, wake up Martin Luther.”

He wrote it, Mr. Paisley said before the concert, after the 2008 election, when he was in New York City on election night and saw jubilation in Times Square. “It just felt like the world had shifted on a dime,” he said. “I wanted to encompass this big theme of how far we’ve come in a song.”

He added, “The dream of a songwriter is to write some account of a current event like that, and then deliver it for the person that’s responsible for the current event.”