It's hard to know if there even was a "Tansy Lee," and if there was, what Jones may have learned from him. The recent bio by Anthony Dalton shows that Jones mostly wrote fiction, not fact.

Most (not all) of the shanty texts and fragments in his books seem to have been taken verbatim from Hugill.   The bawdy, non-shanty fragments presumably come from Jones's RN days in the '40s and '50s.