**If there's no evidence of them being removed how can they be replaced?"

I think this question may have been directed at me.If I understand the question, I wouldn't say the that any Gaelic/Celtic roots have been removed from modern day black gospel.But I think alot of it is more distantly related or more watered down then some of the earlier black religious music that preceeded it

I'll explain it this way.Let's say you have a musical style that is a Gaelic/African hybrid, which is 50% Gaelic and 50 % African.And let's say you have another kind of hybrid song that is 50% Swedish and 50% Jewish.Now if you combine these two musical hybrids so there mixed evenly, you would end up with a third kind of music with 25% Gaelic content.If we were keep this game up we could bring the Gaelic content down to even more watered down porportions.Perhaps this isn't the best way of explaining it, but atleast I tried.