Having eclipsed 60-some fast forward years, Steve Harrison represents the "elder statesman" of Airtight. Born into a musical family, Steve cherishes memories of his father Clifford playing the fiddle (left-handed over the bass) and his mother Pauline singing in the kitchen. Dad led a band called "The Vagabond Plowboys" and Mom was billed as "The Singing Cowgirl" at WDZ radio in Tuscola, IL, where Cliff and Pauline first met.

With memories since toddlerhood of Cliff's band performances and practice sessions at the house, taking up a stringed instrument was pretty much a foregone conclusion and inescapable.

Steve was just starting to get decent on guitar when the Folk Music Era began in the '50s. It was something of a natural "modernization" for him as some of the songs and tunes the folk music revivalists were doing were already familiar to him from the music his family elders had always made. Just juiced up a bit and wonderfully re-popularized.

Then came the '60s. Rock-n-Roll, high school quarterback, Eastern Illinois University gymnast, and a nasty little war in Southeast Asia. Steve enlisted in 1966 and finished his 5-year tour of duty as a Army Infantry Captain and fixed-wing aviator, having flown a year of combat missions in Vietnam as a "Birddog" recon and Forward Air Controller (FAC), aka "Skeet." He still wears a Montagnard bracelet in honor of those stalwart brothers.

The mid-70s found Steve between jobs as a research biologist and "just passing through" hometown Charleston when he saw an ad in the local paper for a laboratory analyst with the City of Charleston. Taking that job only as an intended temporary source of income, he retired from that same facility in Y2K, some 22 years later.

The 70s and 80s were musically rich for Steve. Younger brothers (by 10 years) Terry and Garry had taken up stringed instruments and were evidencing some considerable talent at it. It started out with Bluegrass and, upon filling that square, they started seeking the root source material. By this time, Cliff was too debilitated by arthritis to do much fiddling but he did introduce the boys to some of his local contemporaries as sources for the historic tunes they were interested in learning. And so began the field collecting project.

Many of the songs and tunes performed by Airtight are the harvest of years of field collecting efforts by the Harrisons, John Bishop, Lynn "Chirps" Smith, David Miller and other Charleston friends and fellow band members. From the Mississippi to the Wabash rivers, from central Charleston to the southern tip in Cairo, hardly a neighborhood was missed in scouring the state of Illinois for oldtime musicians. And there were many.

In time, our field collecting efforts came to the attention of the Library of Congress Folklife Division where volumes of reel-to-reel and cassette tapes of field collecting sessions are now archived. It is a collection of some considerable historic importance.

Family matters obliged Steve to take his leave from the official state of Illinois oldtime stringband, the Indian Creek Delta Boys (ICDBs), in the mid-80s. He was replaced on clawhammer banjo by the extraordinarily talented Dave Danner who helped pilot the "Crick Delters" well into the '90s when that vaunted (notorious?) group disbanded as younger brother and band fiddler Garry Harrison took up work in Indiana.

The ICDBs totaled three vinyl and one cassette commercial albums and were included on the "Young Fogies" various artist albums (1 & 2) produced by traditional music captain Ray Alden.

Around the turn of the century, Steve was thrilled to hear that former ICDB guitarist John Bishop had set his jaw and declared that he was going to learn how to play the fiddle. Out came the old open-backed Tubaphone banjo that had been doing little besides gathering patina for the past decade, and the fun cranked up again.

Shedding years of rust while John tortured the fiddle into submission, those early days of the Third Millennium enjoyed the company of Dave and Victoria Danner, brother Terry Harrison, Gaye Harrison and her "Motherlode" stringband, John "Doc" Holliday, and a swirl of other friends, pickers and singers.

Eventually, the Saturday evening pickin' party evolved into putting together an oldtime stringband. And what glorious fun it has been. Now, with Bish fabulously skilled on the old long bow, Steve relishing a second musical springtime and the young'ens up to speed, Airtight is ready for the show. Hang on to your hats.

Steve and wife Lin are now empty nesters with daughter Molly having grown up, married, birthed two angelic granddaughters Emmalin and Lillyan and, most sadly for Mom and Dad, moved with husband Brian Keene back to his home state of West Virginia. Steve and Lin have become frequent long-haul travelers.

Getting an early start on the Internet in 1995, Steve is now a silverback "webslinger," Internet marketing whiz-bang, and owner of Environmental Systems Distributing, an online water treatment products and consulting company. Steve serves as primary contact for Airtight info and bookings.