Baldassari played guitar in rock bands as a teen with his brother Buster, but converted to mandolin in 1972 at the Philadelphia Folk Festival when he saw Andy Statman with David Bromberg and Barry Mitterhoff with the Bottle Hill Boys.

[6] Their musical repertoire included bluegrass, classical, Celtic, and jazz, and they revived the 19th-century mandolin orchestra concept: 11 musicians incorporating mandocello, mandola, guitar and bass.

[1] The Nashville Mandolin Trio consisted of Baldassari, Gene Ford (guitar) and John Hedgecoth (mandocello), and recorded several albums on the SoundArt label.

[14] Happy Land: Musical Tributes to Laura Ingalls Wilder is part of the We the People National Endowment for the Humanities collection, which is distributed to 2,000 public, school, and military libraries in the United States and overseas.

[15] On October 26, 2002, Baldassari and the Owensboro Symphony Orchestra premiered "Blue Moon Over Kentucky", his orchestrated tribute to the instrumental music of Bill Monroe, and incorporated standards such as "Roanoke" and "Rawhide.