Toombs was born in
Monroe, Louisiana. He began as a
vaudeville-style song-and-dance man and later became a productive
lyricist and
composer of
doo-wop songs and
rhythm and blues standards in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of his work was done at
Atlantic Records, writing and arranging songs for
Ahmet Ertegun. Toombs was murdered by robbers in the hallway of his apartment house in
Harlem, New York, in 1962. Ruth Brown credited Toombs as a major reason for her success. She describes him as joyful, exuberant man, so full of life that he passed that ebullience on to her. He taught her how to take a moody blues ballad and make it into a bouncy
jump blues.{{cite book ==Songs==