Through the prism of musical work, this article analyses Pablo Garrido's contribution to musicians' unions in Chile during the nineteen-thirties. I argue that the perspective of musical labour allows understanding an eclectic musician such as Garrido in a comprehensive way, rather than isolated. Prior scholarship has studied his contribution to different genres rather than considering him as a musical worker. By analysing Garrido's newspaper articles, I identify the main problems Chilean working musicians suffered and his proposals to overcome them. All these resulted in the First Musicians' Congress in 1940. I conclude by highlighting the difficulty of defining the musical work and emphasising the need to understand musicians' two-sided identity as labourers and artists in a perennial tension.