Moment By Moment: A Song History

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Daniel W. Whittle wrote the words of “Moment By Moment” in 1893, and his daughter May composed the tune, which The Worshiping Church (1990) calls WHITTLE.[1][2] The familiar title comes from the chorus, while the stanzas begin instead with a line about dying with Jesus.[2] Whittle (1840–1901) sometimes published his hymns under the pen name El Nathan.[3] May Whittle studied at D. L. Moody’s school in Northfield, Massachusetts, and at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and in 1894 she married the evangelist’s son William, later making her home with him at Northfield.[4]

An eighteenth-century hourglass with two glass bulbs held in an ornate frame.

Hourglass, glass and lacquer, 18th century. Chosen for the hymn’s title; it has no connection to the song.

An account of the hymn’s origin appears in the 1907 memoir of the gospel singer Ira D. Sankey.[2] Sankey recalled that at the Chicago World’s Fair the London lay preacher Henry Varley told Whittle he did not much care for “I Need Thee Every Hour,” since he needed the Lord every moment, and that Whittle wrote the new hymn soon afterward.[2] According to Sankey, Whittle handed over the copyright of words and music in exchange for five hundred finely printed copies to give to friends, and the song was copyrighted in England on the same day as in Washington.[2] By 1894 Sankey had placed it in Christian Endeavor Hymns, a collection he edited that was published by the United Society of Christian Endeavor with Biglow & Main.[5][6]

Sankey also tells how the South African minister Andrew Murray came across the hymn in London and, visiting Northfield a year later, said it held “my entire creed”; Sankey replied that it had been written within five hundred yards of where they stood.[2] Hymnary.org currently lists the text as published in 178 hymnals.[7] Larry Conger includes it in Hymns For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer, a collection of sixteen gospel hymns arranged for chromatic mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Moment By Moment"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Moment by Moment" (The Worshiping Church, no. 529).
  2. Internet Archive: "My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns" (Ira D. Sankey, 1907).
  3. Hymnary.org: "D. W. Whittle".
  4. Hymnary.org: "May Whittle Moody".
  5. Hymnary.org: "Christian Endeavor Hymns, page 94".
  6. Hymnary.org: "Christian Endeavor Hymns" (1894).
  7. Hymnary.org: "Dying with Jesus, by death reckoned mine".
  8. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer".
  9. Image: Hourglass, glass and lacquer, 18th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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