English: Grave of Gretchen Hood at Glenwood Cemetery in Washington, D.C., in the United States.

Hood was born in Washington, D.C., on September 15, 1886. Her father was Edwin Milton Hood, a famous journalist who pioneered invented diplomatic reporting for the Associated Press and who later founded the National Press Club. She began playing piano at the age of four, and sang in church choirs. At the age of 15, she left for Europe to study singing in London, Paris, and Brussels. In 1912, while visting London, an impetuous Winston Churchill embraced her on the spiral staircase at Parliament. That same trip, she danced with the Prince of Wales (the future Edward V).

She made her operatic debut in May 1914 as Marguerite in the Aborn English Grand Opera Co. production of "Faust". She made her D.C. debut at the National Theatre a month later. She married J. Alvin Muehleisen on November 7, 1914, but left her husband after one month and 10 days. Their marriage was annulled.

Early in her career, she was considered as much a pianist as opera singer. For a time, she edited a Greenwich Village music magazine, and later composed poetry as well as songs. She was the first woman to sing on the air when radio station WJZ opened in 1922, and she accompanied Pearl Bailey on a nationwide radio broadcast in 1930.

A romance with H.L. Mencken began in 1926 when she jokingly told him that he should run for president and that she'd marry him on Inauguration Day. Their friendship blossomed into love, but Mencken broke her heart by marrying English teacher Sarah Haardt in 1930. Haardt died in 1935, and Mencken attempted to renew the romance. Hood refused to see him.

She sang for presidents, called William Jennings Bryan a neighbor, and entertained Presidents William Howard Taft and Warren G. Harding at her home at 1225 Fairmont Street NW For the last decades of her life, Hood taught voice in her home. This largely ceased in 1968 after the Martin Luther King, Jr. riots left her neighborhood devastated.

In the fall of 1977, Hood was hospitalized with cancer and confined to a nursing home in Bethesda, Maryland. She died there on May 2, 1978.