Canaan Records

Canaan Records is a Christian record label and is a subsidiary of Word Entertainment. It was started in 1965 by founder Marvin Norcross as a vehicle for the label's Southern Gospel quartets. Their biggest artist to date is that of the Happy Goodman Family. After being absent from the southern gospel music industry for several years, Word Entertainment revived the Canaan Records label in 2007, placing Dave Clark as the General Manager of the label and announcing Canaan's relaunch on June 6, 2007. The first group to sign with the label after the relaunch was southern gospel veteran group, The Hoppers, who released their first Canaan Records album, The Ride on September 4, 2007. Early labels were red with black print. Later, the label changed to black with a color logo and a distinctive vertical row of colored dots down the middle of the label. In the mid-1980s, the label changed to a full color label showing a desert town (presumably Canaan) at sunset, with colors fading from green to yellow to orange in the sky, and tones of brown for the sand. For the 2007 relaunch of Canaan Records, the logo was changed to display the word "Canaan" in a script-style font with the word "RECORDS" below in a sans-serif font, with the label name surrounded on either side by arching curves, implying an oval shape around the words.

In 2009 Word Records again closed the doors on Canaan Records; Word continues to release "The Canaan Vault" collection on iTunes; remastered past recordings from the 1960s, '70s and '80s strictly for digital download.