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.
[3] 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.