New Orleans, Louisiana has been called the “Big Easy” since the 1960s. Oxford, Mississippi has been called the “Little Easy” since the 1990s.
 
Ron Shapiro, who ran the Hoka Cinema in Oxford, Mississippi, said, as printed in The Globe and Mail (Toronto, ON) on September 14, 1990:
 
“I call Oxford the Little Easy.”
 
”(Jim—ed.) Dees, a writer responsible for dubbing Oxford ‘the Little Easy’” was published by Cox News Service in July 1991 newspapers. Dees, a writer and host of The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour, is usually credited with the “Little Easy” nickname.
 
“Little Easy” is also a nickname for Mobile, Alabama.
 
   
Wikipedia: Oxford, Mississippi
Oxford is a city in, and the county seat of, Lafayette County, Mississippi, United States. Founded in 1837, it was named after the British university city of Oxford in hopes of having the state university located there, which it did successfully attract.
 
As of the 2010 US Census, the population is 18,916; the Census Bureau estimates the city’s 2013 population at 20,865. Oxford is the home of the University of Mississippi, founded in 1848, also commonly known as “Ole Miss”.
 
Thacker Mountain Radio Hour
Host: Jim Dees
Jim Dees has been the host of the The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour since the fall of 2000. His latest book is The Statue and the Fury – A Year of Art, Race, Music and Cocktails (Nautilus Press). He is also the author of Lies and Other Truths, a collection of his newspaper columns and the editor of They Write Among Us, an anthology of Oxford writers. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including Garden and Gun, Paste, Spin and GQ.com.
     
14 September 1990, The Globe and Mail (Toronto, ON), “The Little Easy, Oxford, Mississippi, Is Not Just Faulkner Country” by John Bentley Mays, Destinations sec., pg. 53, col. 1:
“I call Oxford the Little Easy,” he (Ron Shapiro, owner of a theatre called the Hoka—ed.) told me. “It works. And most of us who live here are kind of broke. We know how to handle it.”
 
28 July 1991, The Tennessean (Nashville, TN), “More sound and fury now in Faulkner’s quiet Oxford” by Raad Cawthon (Cox News Service), pg. 5-J, col. 1:
(Jim—ed.) Dees, a writer responsible for dubbing Oxford “the Little Easy,” is not alone in the peculiar hold this place has over him.
 
Garden & Gun
CITY GUIDES
Destination Oxford, Mississippi
The Little Easy no more
by LISA NEUMANN HOWORTH
Jan/Feb 08
(...)
Jim Dees, a local writer and host of Thacker Mountain Radio, broadcast from Off-Square Books, dubbed Oxford the Little Easy, i.e., a teeninecy version of New Orleans.
           
OxfordMississippi.com
Getting Juiced With Ron Shapiro at Main Squeeze
Posted by Derek Moreton on Jan 25, 2009 in Oxford
(...)
Business owner (mostly theatres) from Wyoming to Montana to Idaho and then to Oxford in 1975. Leaving Oxford in 1996, for stints in places like Atlanta, Mexico and San Francisco before heading back to “The Little Easy.”
 
Twitter 
Bill DeJournett‏
@DrReb
Oxford is known by many names- the Little Easy, the Velvet Ditch, and Ozford.
10:59 PM - 4 Jan 2011
   
Google Books
Divas and Dead Rebels
By Virginia Brown
Memphis, TN: Bell Bridge Books
2012
Pg. ?:
Oxford Square is lovely, with old southern architecture and an elegance most often seen in New Orleans. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of that old city to the south. People have been known to call Oxford “The Little Easy” for its ambient lifestyle and laidback attitude that mimics New Orleans. Of course, the “Big Easy” reputation of New Orleans also includes some pretty high crime statistics.
 
Although they didn’t know it yet, The Little Easy had just gotten a rise in crime statistics, too.
 
Twitter     
Ole Miss‏
@Ole_Miss_Baby
The little easy. Aka #Oxford
4:10 PM - 15 Jul 2012
     
Google Books
From Midnight to Guntown:
True Crime Stories from a Federal Prosecutor in Mississippi
By John Hailman
Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi
2013
Pg. 130:
National sports broadcasters often say that their favorite place in the entire United States for a football game is Oxford, calling it the Little Easy, in favorable comparison to New Orleans’s Big Easy.
 
Twitter
❤OleMiss ⚜️WhoDat 💙‏
@whodatholly
@bcd2212 NOLA=Big Easy…Oxford=Little Easy!😉
10:25 PM - 21 Feb 2015
 
Red Cup Rebellion, an Ole Miss Rebels community
Ole Miss and New Orleans go way back, or ‘Why Rebels feel like they belong in the Sugar Bowl’
Rebel football in New Orleans just makes sense.
By The Ghost of Jay Cutler Dec 31, 2015, 1:20pm EST
Ole Miss and New Orleans have a long history together. The Crescent City is but a few dozen miles from Louisiana’s border with the Magnolia State; Oxford’s love of food, music, and drink has earned it the moniker the “Little Easy”; and thousands of Ole Miss students and alumni—and even the university’s new Chancellor, Jeffrey Vitter—call the New Orleans area home.
 
Oxford Magazine 
OXFORD, MY ETERNAL HOME
Jul 4, 2016
BY BETH ANN FENNELLY
(...)
One time, a few years back, I found on his grave a clump of mardi gras beads and paper kazoos and a “Happy 21st Birthday” hat.  Say what you want about “The Little Easy,” as my pal Jim Dees has termed Oxford. People still read here.
   
Twitter
Samantha Downing‏
@smariedowning
Replying to @meganeabbott
Here in the Big Easy we call Oxford the Little Easy. Not sure why.
8:03 AM - 8 Jul 2017
 
Hot Toddy
John Cofield’s Oxford & Ole Miss: Heading Home To Oxford
July 12, 2017
(...)
“My trips back to the town where my childhood Christmas mornings were spent have never come often enough. For Oxonians, for the ones who know exactly what the “Little Easy” means, there is no other journey our cars can roll through that means as much, or feels as fine, as pointing the auto toward Oxford.”
 
Oxford Magazine
February 13, 2018
SISTER CITIES?
What’s behind the growing New Orleans influence on Oxford cuisine?
BY LINDSEY KATE REYNOLDS
PHOTOS BY PAUL GANDY
(...)
Evans acknowledges the “NOLA North” appeal of Oxford, but says he doesn’t “feel the connection on a regular basis.”
(...)
Just don’t call it “the Little Easy,” she urges, referring to a nickname given to Oxford by Jim Dees, the local author, editor, and host of the legendary Thacker Mountain Radio Hour. “It is not the Little Easy!” Howorth exclaims, citing Oxford’s strict open-container laws and fastidious police presence as evidence that the town is not as laidback as its big brethren.