Mary Jennette Whittle Moody

Mary Jennette Whittle Moody, usually called May, was born in Chicago on March 20, 1870, to Daniel Webster and Abigail Hanson Whittle. She attended the Northfield School in Massachusetts from about age fifteen to eighteen, studied at Oberlin from 1888 to 1890, and continued her musical education at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Hymnological sources describe her as a singer, organist, composer, and hymnal editor.

May assisted both her father and Dwight L. Moody in evangelistic work. In 1893 she supplied the music for her father's newly written Moment by Moment; Ira Sankey explicitly identified her as the composer and described receiving words and music together for publication. The tune is now generally called WHITTLE, though some hymnals use MOMENT BY MOMENT or the opening words as its label.

She married William Revell Moody, Dwight L. Moody's son, in 1894 and settled in Northfield, where her husband led the schools founded by his father. May remained involved in the musical life of the Northfield institutions and co-edited later Northfield hymnals. She died at East Northfield, Massachusetts, on August 20, 1963. Her authorship of WHITTLE makes Moment by Moment a distinctive father-daughter collaboration rather than an unrelated later text-and-tune pairing.