The four young men scrape a living hawking barbecued mice on the side of a Malawi highway, but that is just a day job for the Malawi Mouse Boys — who could soon be singing their way out of poverty.

They hunt field mice — a delicacy in Malawi — to grill and sell as kebab snacks to motorists on the busy north-south highway connecting the largest cities of Blantire and Lilongwe.

But when business is slow, they bring out their instruments — a rudimentary guitar crafted from scrap metal and crude homemade percussion rattles — to play home-grown gospel tunes.

It was by the side of the road that Grammy-winning American producer Ian Brennan discovered the Malawi Mouse Boys two years ago.

Brennan stumbled upon them after two weeks of driving for more than 2,000 km criss-crossing the small southern African country on bumpy, dusty roads scouting for musical talent.

“When Alfred (Gavanda) sang for me by the roadside and the local kids joined in on the chorus — the sun was going down — it was about as musical a moment as I’ve had in my life,” Brennan recalled.

Guitar and vocals are backed by a rhythmic pulse of percussion shaken from aluminum soda cans or plastic bottles filled with dried grains of corn.

Living in grass-thatched huts with no electricity or flush toilets, the childhood friends grew up singing songs of faith to entertain villagers for free.

“Few harmonize quite like those that have learned to sing together as kids,” Brennan, famed for his discovery of the legendary Tuareg desert blues band Tinariwen, told AFP.

The Malawi Mouse Boys’ music has been compared to the 20th-century American gospel music of the likes of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and African-American a cappella ensemble the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

One of the band’s vocalists, Zondiwe Kachingwe, is “a world-class powerhouse, soulful singer... and Alfred’s ethereal tenor is their secret weapon with the harmonies,” Brennan said.

Jack McBrams, a music producer, critic and entertainment editor at one of Malawi’s leading dailies, The Nation, describes their music as “quite rare.”

Most poverty-stricken villagers would use music to complain about their welfare instead of singing celebratory gospel tunes, he said.

“They come from a very remote village and they haven’t had any influence apart from themselves. “So this music comes from within... they’re really a diamond in the rough,” McBrams said.

In the two years since they were discovered, the Malawi Mouse Boys have released two albums.

Their debut “He Is #1,” believed to be the first album to be released internationally in the local Chichewa language, was ranked in Amazon’s top 75 albums of 2012.

It was recorded in Brennan’s mobile studio on the beaten earth outside the hut of one of the musicians.

“The only real obstacle to catching lightning-in-a-bottle musically with these ... young men was the tiny spiders that kept crawling into the hard drive and crashing the mobile system,” Brennan said.