From 1982 to 2000, the Dear Friends were an ensemble-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh’s Stephen Foster Memorial devoted to performing nineteenth-century music from the United States.

The Dear Friends Recordings Collection contains eighty-one recordings on cassette, three on CD, and six on reel-to-reel tapes. The majority of the recordings are live performances, though a few were recorded in a studio for radio play and six were commercially released. All recordings were made between 1982 and 2000, and most were engineered by Norm Simeone. The commercially released recordings were recorded at Thomas Studios.